UPDATED June 11, 2020 —Remember Musical.ly? You may recall that it was rebranded as TikTok in August 2018 after being acquired by Chinese company ByteDance the year before. After several years of impressive growth, TikTok has skyrocketed even further in recent months.
The top app is stirring up a revival of short video clips—only now, it’s even more interactive, collaborative, and downright addictive. Recently, TikTok surpassed the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Snapchat in App Store and Google Play downloads.
In fact, during Q1 2020, it had a better quarter than any app ever, with 315 million downloads enticing and captivating consumers with a proclivity for binge-watching video content — especially appealing as global audiences are quarantined at home amid COVID-19.
Coming off remarkable success in 2019, these 20 TikTok statistics show promising signs of continued growth for 2020. To help marketers stay ahead of the trend, check out the most important TikTok stats:
TikTok reached over 2 billion downloads in April 2020. This caps years of strong interest, with the app claiming the “most downloaded app” status in both 2018 and 2019. TikTok was downloaded 315 million times in Q1 2020 — 155.2 million more than in Q1 2019.
For worldwide monthly downloads, TikTok continues to outperform more mature social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat in both Apple and Google’s stores. Since Q1 2017, downloads have increased more than 100%.
TikTok continues to gain traction with new users at a rapid rate. In fact, TikTok’s 2019 downloads accounted for 49% of its all-time downloads. A report shows that its competitor, Instagram, received 238 million less downloads in 2019 than TikTok, with 2019 downloads representing only 28% of its all-time downloads.
At an average of 45 minutes spent on the app per day, TikTok ranks pretty high among time spent on social media platforms. For comparison, U.S. Android users spend 53 minutes on Instagram, 58 minutes on Facebook, and 49.5 minutes on Snapchat.
A recent report surveyed children 4-15-years old during the peak of the U.S. quarantine (March 15 – April) and found users in this young age group spent nearly 86 minutes watching TikTok videos daily.
ByteDance has stated that U.S. users open the app eight times a day and individual sessions on the app are the longest at 4.9 minutes — Facebook (4.7 minutes), Instagram (3.1 minutes), and Snapchat (1.6 minutes) all rank lower.
The Coronavirus stay-at-home order seems to have only escalated TikTok’s new user growth. TikTok broke records by having more than 115.2 million installs during the month of March 2020. For comparison, in 2019, Instagram only averaged 111.5M downloads per quarter.
TikTok has shown amazing growth in the area of new installs. 2019 was especially impressive with installs climbing 96% year-over-year. TikTok continues to break records with unprecedented downloads in Q1 2020.
With interest in the app at an all-time high, TikTok is shifting their 2020 goals to focus on monetization and developing tools for their creator community.
TikTok is estimated to have over 800 million monthly active users. Currently the largest social network, Facebook is estimated to have 2.6 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2020.
With 800 million MAUs, TikTok leads over Linkedin, Pinterest and Twitter who have 675 million, 367 million, and 340 million MAUs respectively. Impressively, TikTok also outperforms Reddit, the 6th most visited site in the world, which has 430 million MAUs.
Data from App Ape Lab found that TikTok’s engagement rate — determined as the percentage of monthly users who open the app every day — is over 70%.
In 2018, Apptopia reported TikTok’s monthly engagement rate to be 29%, showing a two year increase of over 30% engagement. This widespread increase suggests that TikTok has made progress in its efforts to consistently engage new users on a daily basis
The majority of TikTok’s users are young social media users. In the U.S., 63.5% of the app’s monthly active users are 10-to 24-year-olds, and 52% are iPhone users.
One of TikTok’s competitors, Snapchat, struggles with user-growth, but boasts similar age demographics, with 78% of its U.S. users falling within the 18-24 years-old category.
Early 2018 data from App Ape Lab estimated TikTok’s global users as 55.6% male and 44.4% female. An updated study shows an appreciable shift in gender demographics with female users now far outnumbering male users by a 2:1 ratio.
The same dataset reveals that female user presence skews most dramatically among TikTok users in their teens.
This shows a notable distinction when compared to rival Instagram’s demographics that show a level gender distribution of users with 51% female daily active users and 49% male daily active male users.
From January 2020 to April 2020, TikTok saw its growth in U.S. users ages 25-34 rise at the fastest rate out of any age group during quarantine. In January, Adweek estimated TikTok to have 5 million U.S. millennial users.
By April, that population reached 11 million. While TikTok’s growth of millennial users rose the fastest during quarantine, TikTok also added 5 million new U.S. users ages 18-24 during the January to April time period.
Up until recently TikTok gained revenue through users buying coins in-app to send to other users on live streams. Over the lifetime of the company, TikTok users have spent $456.7 million buying coins on the app.
The U.S. accounts for about 20% of that total with $86.5 million spent. While this approach certainly made money, the company has recently ramped up new revenue streams with e-commerce features such as buy links, hashtag challenges, and in-feed ads.
These efforts have led to impressive numbers with promises of more to come. The app enjoyed its best earning ever in Q4 2019 with $88.5 million. During February 2020 (in a single month vs. quarter), TikTok earned $50.4 million, which is a 784.2% year-over-year increase.
The top 50 TikTok influencers have a following comparable to 16% of the global population. TikTok’s top creators have more followers combined than the 1.2 billion population of the African continent.
In total, the high-profile group of TikTok influencers have already garnered more than 1,270,000,000 followers. Of course, this does not take into account repeat followers; however, the number does help represent the massive influence of TikTok’s top creators.
Since the start of 2020, TikTok has cemented its status as the number one most downloaded app month over month, falling second only in April to ZOOM.
Since the beginning of 2019, WhatsUp, Messenger, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram continue to lead month over month as the top five most downloaded apps worldwide.
In May 2020, Sensor Tower estimated TikTok had more than 111.9 million installs, a 2x year-over-year increase from May 2019.
The vast majority of TikTok use is experienced through Android devices globally with 75.5% of TikTok downloads coming from the Google Play Store app.
Though downloads on Google Play measure almost triple, Google Play’s dominance of TikTok downloads is likely attributable to India’s mobile phone market, which largely favors Androids over iPhones.
With forecasts suggesting that Android’s worldwide market share will reach 87% in 2022, it’s no shock that Androids win out with TikTok in terms of overall use.
TikTok’s hashtag challenges form an integral part of its online community appeal, and popularity. Users encourage each other to participate in ‘challenges’ named with a hashtag.
Some of these challenges have had an enormous impact, such as the #RaindropChallenge, which features users using filters to appear as though they’re stopping a downpour of rain. The hashtag has over 1 billion views so far and ranks as one of the best examples of popular TikTok challenges.
TikTok creators have shown extra enthusiasm for hashtag challenges — making it a valuable opportunity for marketers.
For example, the popular #InMyFeelings challenge originated on Instagram, but it became a hit on TikTok in its own right and racked up roughly 5 million videos compared to Instagram’s 1.7 million.
Chinese company ByteDance (who owns TikTok) originally created “Douyin” for China. After its success, TikTok became Douyin’s international counterpart. Looking at just TikTok numbers, downloads/usage of the app across the globe has been skyrocketing.
India leads the way, and the U.S, Russia, and Turkey each have enthusiastic and unique creators that reflect local culture.
In 2019, India was the top market for TikTok downloads (not including Chinese Android downloads) with 323 million downloads in total. ByteDance has made the app available in 155 markets and in 75 languages as part of its overseas push — something similar apps (e.g. Snapchat) have failed to prioritize in their quest for users.
Of the 2 billion cumulative downloads, it’s estimated that 30.3% of all unique installs come from India, with 8.2% hailing from the U.S. (this is excluding installs from third-party Android stores in China).
2019 was a controversial year for TikTok, with a slew of security, privacy, and data concerns making headlines for the app.
On April 3, 2019 an Indian court ruled that the app could expose children to sexual predators, pornographic content and cyber-bullying, and on April 17th downloads of the app were blocked by the Indian government (existing users were not affected).
TikTok appealed the decision, saying it had measures to restrict inappropriate content, and the court reversed its ruling on April 24, 2019. Bytedance reportedly lost $500,000 in revenue each day that TikTok was banned from app stores in India.
Since the incident, TikTok has expanded its reach in India drastically. TikTok released a statement that as of August 2019, the app has been downloaded on 30% of all Indian smartphones.
Statista reports that TikTok users ages 10-19 represent around 37% of TikTok’s United States user base. It is important to note, TikTok currently only allows users 13 years of age and older to create an account.
Since 2019 when the app’s security risks made headlines, TikTok has been taking many measures to buff up safety practices, and data security measures.
TikTok now only allows users 18 and older to purchase, send or receive virtual gifts/currency. TikTok is also rolling out Family Pairing which allows parents to link their TikTok account to their teen’s and set control restrictions for content, messaging and screen time.
TikTok’s in-app shopping feature, called “Hashtag Challenge Plus”, allows users to browse products that are associated with a sponsored Hashtag Challenge without leaving TikTok’s platform.
Partnering with eight top influencers on the app, CoverGirl promoted its new product line while targeting TikTok’s predominantly Gen Z audience. The influencer-created videos have been viewed over 34 million times, and received over 3.2 million likes.