What’s TikTok?

A global music and video platform, it was created in 2016 by Chinese internet technology company ByteDance. TikTok is known in China as Douyin. The video-sharing app has 150 million active daily users and the global app has three times that many subscribers. Most of the videos feature lip-syncing, lots of pets especially cats doing fun stuff, lots of pretty girls, many young, and parkour or other thrill-seeking clips among myriad other short clips.

When YouTube crashed Tuesday night, TikTok was quick to swoop in.

But can a platform with 15-second video clips survive? Think Vine, for example. TikTok took over Musical.ly in 2017 and that addition may have helped increase subscribers so that’s good for its bottom line.

But there’s also widespread criticism of TikTok and some of it based on questionable videos, namely ones that feature scantily clad women and girls with creepy looking guys peering in. The ads for the app have been faulted by Redditors as being disturbing.

“I saw one where a 40 year old looking man made weird faces to a 14 year old midget.”

“I keep getting this ad over and over again, it’s the same girl every time. She’s got some messed up teeth and is just generally trashy looking. Not trying to be mean, I also won’t lie though. What’s up with that? It’s awkward and creepy.”

18 Facts About TikTok That You May Not Have Known

  1. Downloads: As of this writing, 110 million Americans have downloaded TikTok. Nearly 1.2 billion have downloaded the app worldwide.
  2. Top App: SensorTower.com reports that in 2019, TikTok has hovered between the #1 and #3 spot for top app downloads around the globe.
  3. Facebook: Last year, Facebook launched Lasso in an effort to compete with TikTok, but monthly downloads have averaged less than 1% of TikTok’s.
  4. Founder: Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company, was founded by 36-year-old Zhang Yiming. The company is now worth $75 billion, making it the most valuable start-up in the world.
  5. Usage: According to internal documents acquired by The Wall Street Journal, the average user opened TikTok more than 8 times and spent about 45 minutes a day on the app as of March, 2019.
  6. Super Bowl Spot: TikTok was ready to air a commercial it created for the SuperBowl, but cancelled the ad because they didn’t want to grab the attention of Washington, DC in the wake of the Huawei scandal.
  7. Musical.ly: Bytedance acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 and upgraded the app’s recommendation engine. In August 2018, Bytedance dropped the Musical.ly name in favor of TikTok.
  8. Global Offices: TikTok has offices in Beijing, Berlin, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo.
  9. Artificial Intelligence: TikTik uses artificial intelligence to figure out which video posts are most likely to generate views and which videos are likely to go viral.
  10. Editing Tools: Users make their videos using TikTok’s editing tools, which allows them to add music and other effects.
  11. Sharing: Facebook and Snap allow users to share content only with friends. TikTok allows users to share content with the whole world.
  12. Ad Sales: The app is working to ramp up ad sales in the U.S. When it does launch its ad platform, ads will be seamlessly embedded in the TikTok stream similar to the way Facebook embeds ads in the Facebook stream.
  13. Apps: Bytedance has a variety of other apps that are available in China, but has focused its efforts for TikTok outside of China.
  14. Censored: India and Indonesia have temporarily banned downloads or restricted access to TikTok because of concerns about the content.
  15. FTC Violation: In February of 2019, Bytedance agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle FTC allegations that it illegally collected personal information from children under 13. After the fine was paid, TikTok tweaked the app to split users into age-appropriate areas.
  16. Snapchat: Tech companies in the U.S. have accused Bytedance of copying American innovations. A Bytedance app called Duoshan replicates many of Snapchat’s Stories features, including disappearing videos, the editing tools, and the method of discovering other videos.
  17. Revenues: Douyin and TikTok contributed more than $1 billion to Bydance’s 2018 revenue. Despite this, TikTok is not consistently profitable.
  18. Virality: The app has spawned numerous viral trends and internet celebrities around the world, propelled songs to fame, and is known to be popular among celebrities due to its popularity and social influence.