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I TikTok’s Meteoric Rise
Zhang Yiming
Technology
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TikTok’s Meteoric Rise
TikTok’s rise to dominance has not been without adversaries. Since it was launched five years ago, the Chinese-owned shortform video sharing app has been through ban threats, corporate team restructuring, and crackdowns.
Despite losing India, one of its largest markets, TikTok now has a billion monthly active users worldwide—a milestone it achieved faster than most of its social app rivals. In comparison, Facebook and Instagram hit one billion users in 2012 and 2018, respectively, eight years after they were introduced. YouTube touched a billion monthly users in 2013, seven years after Google acquired the company.
Here’s a look at TikTok’s bumpy yet tumultuous ascent over the last five years.
2016
In September 2016, billionaire founder Zhang Yiming’s ByteDance introduced a new videosharing app, Douyin, to China.
2017
In May 2017, Douyin was launched outside China and rebranded to TikTok in the international market. By November of that year, the company had bought another Chineseowned short-video platform Musical.ly, in a $1 billion deal. Musical.ly at the time had already captured a considerable young market in the U.S., marking the beginning of TikTok’s market expansion beyond its home base. 2018 Musical.ly officially merged with TikTok in August 2018. In 2020, TikTok revealed for the first time its detailed user numbers in a court filing, which showed that by January 2018 it had close to 54.8 million global monthly users. That figure would multiply by nearly five times to over 271 million monthly users by the end of 2018. According to mobile app data analytics firm, Sensor Tower, TikTok leapfrogged to become the fourth most downloaded non-game app for that year, overtaking Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat, with 667 million first-time downloads.
2019 On the back of its rapid rise, 2019 would be the year that TikTok’s popularity and its handling of personal data would begin to be questioned in the U.S. According to Reuters, by November that year, the then Trump administration opened a national security probe into ByteDance’s $1 billion purchase of Musical.ly. Undeterred, TikTok only grew its userbase even higher and faster. By December 2019, its global monthly user count touched more than 507.5 million—a 87.2% increase from a year earlier. In 2019, TikTok became the second-most downloaded non-gaming app in the world next to WhatsApp, this time eclipsing Facebook and Messenger, according to Sensor Tower.
2020 Several corporate dilemmas emerged for TikTok in 2020 amid growing pressure from the Trump administration, which threatened to ban the company in the U.S. unless it gave up control of the social app in North American to an American buyer. In an exclusive report, TikTok staffers revealed to Forbes that morale within the company suffered during a rough year of Trump’s wrath. In an effort to avert a falling out with the government, TikTok appointed former Disney CEO Kevin Mayer in May 2020 to lead the company as CEO, only for him to step down in August.
In June that year, India banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps citing national security concerns, and Oracle and Walmart agreed to acquire a 20% stake in TikTok’s global business, although as of October 2021 the deal was on hold. As TikTok continued to contend with the U.S. government, by July 2020 user numbers had hit 689.1 million monthly. It ended the year as the world’s most downloaded non-game app, according to Sensor Tower, officially surpassing all Facebook-owned apps.
2021 As it entered a new year and welcomed a new U.S. administration, TikTok was still without a CEO. However, by the end of April 2021, ByteDance had chosen its Chief Financial Officer Shouzi Chew to helm TikTok. Challenges in the U.S. also begin to subside after the Biden administration revoked a series of Trump-imposed bans on TikTok and the reported postponement of the app’s U.S. asset divestment. However, founder Zhang Yiming plans to step down as CEO by the end of the year.
By the end of Q3 2021, TikTok had hit a new milestone, claiming that it now has a billion monthly users globally. It also remains the leading social media app by downloads, with over 59 million installs in September alone, according to Sensor Tower.
