TikTok hit 1 billion monthly active users globally, the company announced via a blogpost, marking a 45% jump since July 2020.
The United States, Europe, Brazil, and Southeast Asia are the biggest markets for the popular short-video app, the company said.
TikTok has experienced surges in users around the world in the past few years, despite regulatory scrutiny, it is facing in the United States and other regions.
The company previously said it had about 55million global users by January 2018. That number rose to more than 271 million by December 2018, 508 million by December 2019, and 689 million by July 2020.
Facebook reported 2.9 billion monthly active users as of the end of June 2021, according to its latest quarterly report. TikTok previously said it surpassed 2 billion global downloads by August 2020.
The video-sharing platform is owned by China's technology giant ByteDance. TikTok appointed ByteDance's CFO Shouzi Chew, a Singaporean national, as the new chief executive officer of the company earlier this year.
The competition that TikTok poses to Western tech giants is becoming a headache for many of its competitors— as a result Instagram, owned by Facebook, has radically shifted its focus, declaring that it’s no longer a photo-sharing app. Instagram is heavily promoting Reels, its TikTok clone, and even discussion forums like Reddit are enticed by the promise of short-form video feeds. Instagram even advised creators that if they recycle watermarked TikToks as posts on Reels, the content will be less discoverable.
TikTok said that its biggest markets are in the United States, Europe, Brazil and Southeast Asia, while its parent company ByteDance is headquartered in China.
Of course, TikTok has faced severe regulatory threats in recent years — former President Trump attempted to block U.S. business transactions with TikTok, and in India, home to 1.36 billion people, TikTok has been banned since last year.
Despite it all, TikTok continues to exhibit impressive growth.
As recently as last month, TikTok parent ByteDance bought the VR hardware company Pico, indicating a potential future expansion into VR.
It’s not a coincidence that all the while, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn his trillion-dollar platform into a VR powerhouse.
IOL TECH