The big pic: TikTok this calendar week eclipsed a major milestone every bit the ByteDance-endemic video sharing and social networking service at present has more than than 1 billion monthly active users. Still, they've got some footing to brand up if they want to be number ane overall. Facebook in its most contempo quarter said it had 2.90 billion monthly agile users, an increase of seven per centum year over year.

TikTok'southward roots engagement back to belatedly 2022 when ByteDance launched a brusk-form video app called A.me in China. The app, which was developed in just 200 days, was before long rebranded equally Douyin and within 1 year, had already amassed more than than 100 1000000 users.

While impressive, ByteDance'due south founder knew that if they didn't aggrandize globally, someone else would swoop in to cater to the roughly lxxx percentage of Cyberspace users that reside outside of People's republic of china. This prompted ByteDance to go out and learn Northward America'southward near popular video-sharing app, Musical.ly, for $i billion and create a new platform known as TikTok.

ByteDance's new app took the world by storm. In 2022, TikTok passed Instagram, YouTube and Facebook to become the nearly downloaded app of the year and has continued to proceeds market share always since, despite some serious privacy concerns along the way. Lucrative licensing deals with both Sony Music and Warner Music Group at the cease of last year only helped grow TikTok's user base.

Oddly enough, ByteDance continues to operate Douyin and TikTok as separate platforms despite sharing a nearly identical user interface. This separation likely has to do with strict Chinese censorship laws, and / or privacy concerns in other parts of the earth.

Image credit Cleyton Ewerton