Top 10 Facts about TikTok

TikTok today is famous around the globe but what people might not know is that it was incepted in China! Tiktok was started by its parent company called Bytedance in 2016 by the name of Douyin. Douyin is still what the App is called in China.

Before TikTok got fame outside China, it was an app called musical.ly that enjoyed the limelight worldwide. Musical.ly was a similar video sharing app like TikTok and was based in Shanghai. On November 9^th2017, ByteDance(TikTok’s parent company) bought Musical.ly

For USD 1billion, TikTok’s decision of buying Musical.ly was the lead by the notion of spreading its influence to the west and as Musical.ly had already built that, it gave TikTok a solid foundation to build on.

TikTok currently has an active user base of 500 million people. That’s more than Twitter, Linkedin and Snapchat. The active user base keeps increasing with more people joining the platform, this number will surpass 1billion. The hike in active users was seen when musical.ly was acquired by TikTok as this brought in audience from the west

@lisaandlena, German-born identical twins have the most followed account of tiktok outside with 31.5 million fans! This is up from the 25.2 million fans the pair had about a year ago.

TikTok has gained a lot of popularity in such a short span of time and it is obvious that It wants to gain even more! TikTok was one of the brands to be advertising in the coveted Superbowl halftime but, they backed out in order to stay low on the radar of Washington DC after the Huawei scandal.

TikTok’s parent company: ByteDance, was founded in 2012 in china. Today it is the most valuable start up with an estimated valuation of 75billion. It has risen in valuation since the inception of TikTok and continues to do so.

TikTok as fun it might be, pose some problem regarding explicit content. On July 3^rd2018, TikTok was banned in Indonesia. The Indonesian government held TikTok guilty of spreading appropriate and explicit content. TikTok then went ahead and made a team of 20 people to look into censorship.

The same year in November, the app was banned in Bangladesh stating the same reasons as Indonesia.The Indian politicians also put TikTok on blast for encouraging dangerous activites and joblessness just for the sake of a 15 seconds video and today there are signs outside Indian Monuments that say “No TikTok”.

In 2019, TikTok was the most downloaded app with over 33 million downloads on the app store. Currently, it’s on the 3^rd position onthe Play Store behind only WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. This goes to show the popularity spectrum of the app and its massive growth rate.

TikTok’s highest download rate comes from India with a staggering number of 466.8 million downloads, that’s 31% of all the downloads worldwide. India is followed by China with 173.2 million downloads and the USA with 123.8 million. The number clearly depicts the popularity of the app in India and in other countries. The number continues to rise daily.

TikTok is a global platform but has content for everyone. The ‘for you’ page employs TikTok’s video suggestion algorithm to suggest videos that you might like. It relies on the accounts you have liked and followed and videos that you view on a regular basis. The algorithm also takes into consideration your region and your language preference giving you localized content. It also picks videos from a genre of videos such as hacks, beauty, comedy etc. based on your preferences.