TikTok Surpasses One Billion Monthly Active Users
TikTok – the powerhouse, the top dog, Gen Z’s favourite of the social media platforms – has hit a whopping one billion monthly active users. That means that one in seven-and-a-half people globally regularly scroll vertically through the wealth of short-form videos the app has to offer.
The revered video-streaming service hit this impressive mark at the start of this week, on September 27th, but it’s certainly been a long time coming. Having upped its game in the last year, with features including ‘Resume’, ‘Q&A’, ‘Auto-captions’, ‘TikTok Playlists’, live-streaming and live shopping, this win doesn’t come as a surprise.
TikTok’s growth has been meteoric — this new user data shows a 45% increase in monthly active users since July 2020, when it had 689 million users. What’s more, last July TikTok was crowned the first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion global downloads, as reported by app analytics firm SensorTower.
It’s the app that every Gen Z netizen wants to get big on, and the platform that all other platforms want to be. It’s pretty telling that its signature short-form video format has been swiped by Instagram (‘Reels’), Snapchat (‘Spotlight’), and YouTube (‘Shorts’). Plus, with ‘TikTok Stories’ in the pipeline, it’s on the road to becoming an even greater threat; this ephemeral, vanishing-post format was the last feature TikTok’s competitors really had against it.
It’s bursting at the seams with monetisation features, is a partner to a host of influential companies (Vimeo, Canva, Bumble, UniLAD, WWE), has become a primary way to unearth music talent, to find jobs, to get famous. Its creators are stars – idols, even, for the younger generations. It is, to put it simply, on fire, and it doesn’t look like there’s any chance of it getting put out anytime soon.
Finally, for our previous #SocialShort, click here.
