The TikTok Story: How An Idea Grew Into A Multi-Billion-Dollar Social Media Giant
TikTok is considered to be the hottest app these days. TikTok which was launched in 2016 was founded by the 35 year old Zhang Yiming who lives in China. Since its launch, it has rapidly gained popularity around the world but it is most used in Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Turkey, Russia and United Stated. According to the reports, TikTok has made Zhang Yiming a billionaire who has a current net worth of $16 billion. The company has achieved a milestone surpassing about 2 billion mobile downloads around the world in October 2020.
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Zhang Yiming first launched an app called Douyin which is exactly like TikTok but only caters to the market in China. He launched Douyin through his company, ByteDance, in September 2016 in China. Yiming believes that China is only a portion of the internet users globally and he thinks that his company is missing out on a huge opportunity if they do not expand on the global scale. Douyin was developed in about 200 days only and in less than a year, about 100 million users were using the app and about one billion video views every day. With this result, Yiming was inspired to create an exact same app but will be catered worldwide.
ByteDance finally launched TikTok in the global market a year later in September 2017 and in less than five months after its launch, the app became the top free application with the highest number of downloads in Thailand and other countries as well. Today, Tiktok has been downloaded over 130 million times in the United States alone and has reached about 2 billion downloads across the world. These data were released by the mobile research firm Sensor Tower. The numbers provided excludes all the Android users in China.
Even celebrities around the world are using the app, big names like Tony Hawk and Jimmy Fallon have started using the app in 2018 while numerous celebrities followed such as Jessica Alba, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez and even Justin Bieber.
ByteDance, the parent company of Tiktok, has spent about $1 billion to purchase the startup called musical.ly which was then headquartered in Shanghai with an overseas office located in Santa Monica, California. During that time, Musical.ly was doing well in the market and was used by a large portion of the market. The app which was launched in August 2014 is a social media video platform which allows its users to create short lip-sync as well as comedy videos. It is a popular app among the teens and younger audiences. Yiming looks forward to leverage the U.S. digital platform's young user base which is why they decided to merge with musical.ly to create a much larger video community. The existing accounts and data were consolidated in just one app which is Tiktok. With this move, TikTok became the worldwide app, ending the time of musical.ly.
It was announced on September 3, 2019 that TikTok will be partnering with U.S. National Football League. The deal was signed about two days before the NFL's 100th season started at the Soldier Field. As agreed by both parties, TikTok will be hosting activities for the fans as part of the deal. The partnership also includes the launch of the official NFL TikTok account which will bring about new marketing opportunities for NFL such as hashtag challenges and sponsored videos. With this move, in less than a year, TikTok has reported about 800 million active users worldwide each month.
The success of Tiktok can be mainly attributed to how it can flip what users think of as social media on its head. These days, whether it’s a newly opened small business or even an already established brand, numerous businesses uses Tiktok to maximize their reach. Creating content on the app that will go viral can help boost the popularity as well as the audience share of the business. Businesses can reach more people by growing a massive fan base through followers and subscribers.
TikTok attracts a lot of users in so many ways which makes it the most favorite app these days. They firstly attract their users with the convenience that they offer since it is much easier to edit and upload content using TikTok compared to other apps like Instagram or even Snapchat. Almost anyone who owns a smartphone can create and post content easily. Another factor for their popularity is they are offering unique user experience which is perfect to the young generation who are glued to their phones and trying to kill boredom. It is certainly appealing to the younger generation since their content is suitable for those who have short attention span. The app has a great algorithm as well in learning the user preferences which will then provide the user a customized video feeds.
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