TikTok, deployed in China as Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.
From there, TikTok snowballed into the most popular app in 2019 and 2020. It was downloaded 693 million times in 2019 and 850 million times in 2020.
TikTok has been installed on devices over 3.5 billion times worldwide. It passed the one billion-milestone in February 2019 and the two billion-figure in April 2020. It reached three billion in Mid-2021.
Most active TikTok users in the United States: 136.42 million. Also in the top three countries with the largest number of TikTok users are Indonesia (99.07 million) and Brazil (73.58 million).
TikTok has one billion monthly active users worldwide, compared to Instagram, which has two billion monthly active users. While TikTok has an audience mainly made up of Gen Z users, Instagram is more popular among Millenials.
It launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018. TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content.
The app was launched in 2016 by the Chinese technology company ByteDance. Now available in more than 150 different markets, TikTok has offices in Beijing, Los Angeles, Moscow, Mumbai, Seoul, and Tokyo. The app saw about 1 billion global daily users by early 2022.
It took 2 years to become the most downloaded app in the USA in 2018. TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. Shou Zi Bite became the CEO of TikTok in May 2021.
TikTok does not directly pay creators to produce and upload videos. TikTok does offer funding for creators in the form of the TikTok Creator Fund (more on that above). Still, payment varies based on factors like the number of video views, engagement rates, and the authenticity of users engaging with the post.
One of the main reasons why TikTok has been so successful, is because it emphasises the one piece of content that gets the most engagement – short-form videos. Whether it be on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram, creative short-form videos always grab users' attention when scrolling across the timeline.
Like many other social media platforms, TikTok generates revenue through in-app purchases. The app provides from 100 to 10,000 virtual coins that range in price from 99 cents to $99.99. TikTok coins are an in-app currency that people can buy as long as they are at least 18 years of age.
Ownership concerns
TikTok Ltd is owned by ByteDance Ltd, a Chinese multinational company headquartered in Beijing and domiciled in the Cayman Islands. Last September, TikTok hit 1 billion monthly active users across the world, about 7 million of which are in Australia.
Charli D'Amelio is one of TikTok's first content creators. She started by sharing dance videos, recreating, or sharing original choreographies. With time, she became the face of TikTok before the network went viral, and when TikTok's downloads exploded, Charli D'Amelio's followers did just the same.
Musical.ly users opened their phones to a surprise today as they found the app replaced with a new logo and name: TikTok. The app was acquired by Chinese company ByteDance in November 2017, which absorbed Musical.ly into its own TikTok app this morning.
TikTok has about 2.5m Australian users, about 30% of whom are under 15.
Common Sense recommends the app for age 15+ mainly due to the privacy issues and mature content. TikTok requires that users be at least 13 years old to use the basic TikTok features, although there is a way for younger kids to access the app.
There are 2,853,197 TikTok users in Australia in 2022.
As for the TikTok Creator Fund, you can earn between 2 and 4 cents for every 1,000 views. This means you might expect $20 to $40 after reaching a million views. Learn more about the TikTok Creator Fund here.
The app is owned by the company ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing.
TikTok has released a variety of tools to help creators make money from brands and followers. The company is also paying users directly via its Creator Fund and TikTok Pulse ad program. Payouts from its fund and ad-revenue sharing range between a few cents to around $8 per 1,000 views.
As of October 2022, Zhang's personal wealth was estimated at US$55 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index (US $49.5 billion, according to Forbes), making him the second-richest person in China, after Zhong Shanshan.
TikTok, owned by Chinese technology firm ByteDance, is largely responsible for popularizing the short-form video format that YouTube, alongside other imitators, is now aping with its micro-video Shorts platform.
TikTok pays between 2 to 4 cents per 1,000 views on a video. The payout varies depending on certain factors that aren't disclosed by TikTok publicly. That's why different creators receive different payouts despite having a similar number of views. However, not every TikTok user gets paid for the views.
According to SEO Design Chicago TikTokers that qualify for the Creator Fund, those who have at least 100,000 followers, could make between $200 to $1,000 a month. Those with over a million could earn $1,000 to $5,000 and more per month.