Tiktok, the buzzing word among internet users these days. Tiktok, a video sharing platform owned by ByteDance(a Chinese company) has been one of the most visited social platforms in recent quarters. It has reportedly crossed 3 billion downloads in 2021.
Tiktok, where a normal user spends hours scrolling the videos, fed by the algorithm is making users more inclined towards this platform. TikTok is doing exceptionally well in terms of making the user devoted to this platform with its service which also can be clearly understandable from the data that, “Tiktok was the most visited site in 2021”. It is now outnumbering many big giants like Twitter and Snapchat.
Tiktok came into the market very late in 2016. It had huge companies in front of itself that have been with the people for a decade or so. To come this late and to take battle with these giants was not an easy task. It had to be done out of the box to stand here. But with a team of outstanding experts and AI, it did what we thought was really challenging. Not only outnumbering some of them, but giving a threat to others as being the projected number one in the near future with the current rate. Meta, with 3 of its companies as top five social media platforms, has been seriously considering TikTok as a big threat and started planning regarding this issue.
How come TikTok became so popular?
With the exceptionally well designed Algorithm, it was certain to be one. When talking about an algorithm , the first thing that comes to mind here is its recommendation algorithm. Tiktok has a very well designed architecture for making users spend hours on the platform. Tiktok takes data on how much time we spend watching a particular type of video and recommends us according to that. To be specific, around 90-95% of tiktok videos for us in our feed are according to recommendation and only the rest of them are as random videos, which is huge.
Tiktok has short videos, tentatively around 20-25 seconds on average, has been the best thing for them in many ways. Also, It has been a win-win for both users and tiktok. Users do love consuming more content in less periods of time. They want more and more videos to laugh on, learn from videos, be entertained and so on. And meanwhile, the tiktok as service providers are also benefited by getting lots of data from users within so much less time.
In 10 minutes, with 25 seconds video 200+ videos can be watched by a single user and the same amount of different data too. Isn’t it cool for them?
While we talk about its comparison with other socials, it has been a threat to video streaming platforms too. Netflix, which had more than double the revenue of ByteDance in 2018, now has half the revenue of ByteDance. The biggest trick the Tiktok has done here was the omission of the decision from users. The gist here is, surfacely we assume that providing choice for users to decide what to watch is a good approach but in today’s context of a busy world people do not want to make extra decisions to watch videos on the internet for entertainment. They love being fed by clips, where the user feels excited and happy with the release of dopamine. Continuous feed of non stop entertaining videos is what the user loves here.
What are the current statistics?
While people are downloading the apps without showing signs to slow down, the downloads have now crossed 3.5 billion overall.
Similarly, talking about the distribution of the data of different countries considering the users of age greater than 18. The United States of America stands first with about 136 million users and followed by Indonesia.
Infact, Tiktok had 190 million users in India before the country decided to ban the app due to security issues.
And the app has gender users distribution as follows where the females leads males by 14%.
While talking about the age demographic distribution of the Tiktok users. It seems 63% of the users are from 10-29 age. This shows the app is very popular among teenage and youths.
Similarly, Tiktok is used by 18% of total internet users among the users above 18. That is a lot of numbers in fact.
And a recent study showed that the user’s session count increased by 30% in 1st quarter of 2022. This shows that Tiktok is growing more and more.
To add more, Instagram instals down by 7% in the last quarter of 2021. All data shows that tiktok has successfully and brilliantly held the market and made a very excellent grasp on the market. This is now eyeing to the next level and maintain this or add more things on this revolutionary app. In my opinion, the way Tiktok works with the data it collects to understand its users and adapt and build excellent plans and execute is extraordinary and is very much deserving to get this popularity it is gaining now.
Some Controversies
Reading up to now we might assume or subconsciously have the idea that everything is going well for TikTok but in fact it is terribly wrong. There are almost like 2-3 big headlines per month describing “Why you should ban Tiktok” and many more news coming and most of them are from, yes you guessed it right haha, the United States. And this concern is somewhat very necessary because it is unclear that the Tiktok may share the users data with the Chinese government due to their policy which is very very wrong. The users data for making the experience on the app good is very welcomed or may be for advertising is also not a big concern. But direct lending of such crucial data of people around the world to any particular government is not acceptable. Because of this unclarity, there were recent actions of banning Tiktok in countries like India and Malaysia.
Conclusion
But it is absolutely ruling the current social media craziness going. People stay on the platform for 52 minutes on average each day. According to a recent survey, children between the ages of four and fifteen spend 90 minutes every day using the app. Tiktok is extremely addictive. We should understand that the app is doing great from its perspective to gain our attention with all its algorithms and recommendation systems. Meanwhile, we should also understand our limits of social media usage and prevent ourselves from having its addiction.
Thank You.