TikTok right on top

In 2014, the Chinese Musical.ly burst into the scene. With it you could create 15-60 second
music videos. You could lip sync those music videos, record them in slow motion, speed
them up or do a time lapse. There were special effects and filters. You could use hashtags and
browse through other Musical.ly users and create a community. When this sensation crossed
200 million users, ByteDance realized its potential and merged it into its social media video
app TikTok and the rest is history.

It became a sensation among Chinese teenagers and the youth of the world’s two largest
democracies–America and India–were hooked. 2020 should have been the Year of TikTok.
That’s when US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi cracked
down on Chinese companies including TikTok. Instead of a rise, TikTok saw a great fall and
some analysts wrote it off altogether.

But what is it about the short video format in general and TikTok in particular, that caught the
fancy of the youth of the world? If today belongs to Facebook, then it seemed that tomorrow
would belong to TikTok. All the Silicon Valley giants thought they could fill the vacuum
created by TikTok’s fall. We had YouTube Shorts. Instagram Reels. This even as Facebook
tried to push short videos on its own.

But none of them could really replace TikTok as it rose from the ashes like a phoenix in
2021. While it did touch a billion users, that’s still way behind in the billion users club which
boasts of Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp (all Meta); Gmail and YouTube (both
Alphabet) and even the Chinese WeChat, which was also targeted by Trump.

But it’s a real achievement and disruption has come to light in the Cloudflare global traffic
rankings of 2021. TikTok has displaced Google Search which has held onto that crown for
goodness knows how long. From No. 7 in 2020, it is No. 1 in 2021. This has great
significance because this is the first time a Chinese company has beaten an American
company at the global level. Chinese giants dominate China and American giants the rest of
the world.

Here’s another fun fact. TikTok has been released as Douyin in China and that has also
crossed 500 million users. So TikTok-Douyin combo is right now Facebook’s biggest
challenger. It is the first cross border platform that has stormed the three largest populated
countries of the world: China, India and America. Are other Chinese giants watching and will
they want to adopt the TikTok strategy?

TikTok wasn’t the first product that was dismissed for being flippant and just a fad among teenagers. It definitely won’t be the last.