TikTok, on the surface, doesn’t look so different from the litany of other video-centric social media apps that came before it, like Snapchat, Vine, or Dubsmash. TikTok itself has gotten so big that Facebook even quietly launched a competitor called Lasso in November. On December 7, the tech site the Information reported that ByteDance was in talks to raise an additional $1.4 billion for investments in artificial intelligence and media content. At a valuation of more than $75 billion, it’s the first Chinese internet company with a “significant, genuinely engaged following around the world,” according to The Verge. This has translated to enormous success for its parent company, ByteDance, which surpassed Uber as the world’s most valuable startup. And as of February 2019, 27 million of those active users were in the US. It’s smaller than Facebook ( 2.27 billion global monthly active users, including Instagram and WhatsApp, which it owns), but it’s far ahead of Twitter ( 336 million) and Snapchat ( 186 million). Users can also upload their own sounds, so it’s possible to lip-sync to someone else’s original video.Īll of this makes TikTok extremely fun to use, and helps explain why it’s grown so massively: In September 2018, it surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat in monthly installs in the App Store, and was downloaded more than a billion times in 2018. Collaboration is a major incentive - you can do a “duet” with someone by replying to their video, which creates a split-screen diptych, thus feeding into an endless chain of reactions. The gist is this: Users film videos of themselves lip-syncing or acting out comedy sketches, up to 15 seconds long, and can choose from a database of songs, effects, or sound bites. TikTok is one of the most popular - and most interesting - social media apps on the planet, but it has yet to enter the lexicon of most average Americans. “ Hey girl, you like me a little bit?” “ Oh, you’re with her now?” “ Why do good girls like bad guys?” These are questions young people have asked each other since the dawn of time, but on TikTok, they’ve turned into massively widespread memes set to music, reaching millions in every corner of the globe.
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