“The app itself offers something no other app does and that’s why it has become so successful: paid acquisitions just help more people know about it,” she said. Even if TikTok’s spending dies off, it now has the momentum to survive, according to Emma Worth of the marketing firm Ralph Creative.
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That spending was recreated on Facebook, Instagram, poster campaigns and TV adverts.Īs a result, according to analytics firm SensorTower, TikTok has been the No 1 app on the worldwide App Store for five consecutive quarters, with an estimated 500 million users worldwide.
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Before ByteDance was even earning revenue from the app, the company was the single largest advertiser on Snapchat, spending nearly $1bn (£800m) on app install ads on the messaging platform, according to the Wall Street Journal. That pre-existing scale also gave TikTok another weapon: a huge war chest. The Chinese startup was already famous in its homeland for viral news app Toutiao, which hit 120 million daily users in 2017, as well as Douyin, the China-only version of TikTok that has been kept separate to comply with Beijing’s strict censorship regime. More importantly, the merger meant TikTok ended up on the smartphones of more than 60 million users overnight.īyteDance had experience of that sort of scale, however. The latter had already become one of the most popular social media platforms for UK and US teenagers by the time it was purchased by TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, in November 2017, and its influence still pervades the platform to this day. If it seems like it came out of nowhere, that’s because in part, it did: the app as it is today is a merger of the original TikTok, which was launched internationally in September 2017, and the earlier viral sensation Musical.ly. Users film themselves in 15-second clips, typically set to music, and upload them to be viewed by followers and strangers alike. But with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK now investigating the company over its handling of young users’ private data, can reality catch up with the viral smash?Īt its core, TikTok is a video-sharing app.
TikTok’s success has taken regulators, parents and its competitors by surprise. The most downloaded app on the App Store for the last year makes almost no money, is barely understood by anyone over 25, and has already faced investigations, fines and bans on three continents.