TikTok is a free app that lets you post videos up to a minute long, most of which are comedy videos, although users cover a wide variety of topics. Creators with more than a thousand followers can live stream to their fans and receive digital gifts that can later be exchanged for money.
The social network has attracted worldwide attention due to its unprecedented success. Available in 150 countries and 75 languages, since the beginning of 2019, as reported by the BBC, the app has denmark phone number list appeared near the top of the download charts.
The majority of its users are between 16 and 24 years old, 90% visit the social network more than once a day, completing an average of 52 minutes, which is equivalent to one billion videos being viewed every day.
Furthermore, due to the health emergency caused by the Covid-19 coronavirus, millions of people had to stay at home and looked for options to entertain themselves, which turned out to be a great boost for TikTok, which in 2020 registered nearly 2 billion downloads worldwide, raising its number of active users to 800 million people and its revenue by 521%.
The origin of TikTok
TikTok, as we know it today, was formed from several apps. The first was an app called Musical.ly that was launched in 2014 and allowed users to create short videos by lip-syncing to pretend to sing or say dialogues from other content. Two years later, Chinese tech giant Bytedance launched a similar service in China called Douyin.
ByteDance then decided to expand to the rest of the world under a different name: TikTok. And in 2018, Bytedance bought Musical.ly and included it in TikTok's operations.
However, Douyin did not disappear; it continues to operate within China as it is designed to comply with the censorship policy imposed by the Communist Party. TikTok, on the other hand, is the version available to the rest of the world. The link between the two apps is the reason for many of the concerns, related both to the security of user data and their respect for freedom of expression.
Knowing that its origins could cause problems, ByteDance tried to distance itself from China, appointing Kevin Mayer, former Disney strategy director, as TikTok's CEO.