TikTok, the new world clock

Launched in China in 2016, the social network TikTok has conquered the planet, setting the pace with its short, effective and engaging videos. A format that has become the grail of all platforms that strive to reproduce the magic formula, with varying success.

Cruel Cyprian! In mid-December, the pioneer of French youtubers, who again ensured the third best audience on the platform in 2021, copiously mocked the site that made him king in a video that went viral with 5.3 million views. In "The boss of YouTube vs TikTok", "Jean-Da", fictional leader of the Google subsidiary, appears, with his old-fashioned mustache and outdated tie, like a "boomer" totally overwhelmed by the innovations of his Chinese competitor.

In this hilarious clip in which many users recognized themselves, certain YouTube flagship products are no longer accessible, priorities such as ASMR (those funny sounds supposed to relax the listener) or gaming have long been exceeded. , the teams are poached by the rival who ends up buying the building hosting the two sites. Cyprien continues to stir the knife in the wound when he makes a young employee of TikTok say: “I watched you when I was little”…

At the start of 2022, modernity has indeed changed continents, as evidenced by a range of unanimous statistics. According to the State of Mobile 2022, the latest benchmark chart compiled on January 12 by mobile data specialist App Annie, TikTok thus overtakes Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp - in short, all the brands of the new Meta - in terms of the number of downloads. as expenditure per consumer. Although banned in India for internal security reasons, TikTok was the most "downloaded" app in the world in 2021 with more than 3 billion cumulative downloads since its creation. It now ranks sixth in number of active monthly users: more than 1 billion officially recorded last September.

The most popular website in the world

According to another respected source, Cloudflare, "the most popular site in the world" dethroned the historical trio Google-Facebook-Microsoft at the end of December in terms of traffic. It registers more connections than Apple, Amazon or even Netflix. After having long been in seventh place, TikTok has experienced a spectacular rise thanks to the audience peaks recorded during Thanksgiving and Black Friday in Anglo-Saxon territories. Great performance for an actor who is only five years old and still only had 85 million fans in 2018. It only took him three years to reach 800 million active monthly users while Instagram took almost twice as long. Compared to veterans Facebook and YouTube, founded in 2004 and 2005 respectively, TikTok remains a youngster.

Australian Anna Layza films herself for TikTok at her home in Melbourne in December 2021.

Australian Anna Layza films herself for TikTok at her home in Melbourne in December 2021.© TODD ANDERSON/NYT-REDUX-REA

The Gen Z identity app was launched in China in September 2016 under the name Douyin by tech company ByteDance, itself founded four years earlier. This Chinese version was declined the following year internationally, more or less in the form of the TikTok that we know, without however offering all the features available in China (payment services in particular). It was with the acquisition of the Musical.ly video app, acquired in 2017 by ByteDance and merged with TikTok less than a year later, that the planet massively converted to the phenomenon. All the teenagers, in the West as in the East, then began to film themselves on their smartphones in the process of taking songs in karaoke mode and chaining dance steps in order to share their performances with the greatest number…

ByteDance, the first truly global pure tech player

“What is unique is that TikTok is consumed today indiscriminately by an American, British, French or Chinese teenager, notes Guillaume Gombert, director of strategic projects at the Faber novel agency. We can even consider that ByteDance is the first truly global pure player in tech since the Gafa are generally struggling to penetrate the largest Asian market and their Chinese counterparts, the BATX (the acronym for Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi ) are at the same time absent from our regions. »