It's a Huge Milestone for TikTok

TikTok is celebrating a huge accomplishment: recruiting one in 7.5 people on the planet to tune in to its videos each month. The company announced it had reached 1 billion monthly active users in a Monday blog post, while Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas thanked users in—what else?—a TikTok video. "That's a billion people every month watching and sharing each other's creativity," she said. The short-form video app counted 55 million global users in January 2018, more than 271 million in December 2018, and 507 million in December 2019, per CNBC. By July 2020, it had 689 million monthly active users. Its growth since then represents a 45% increase. For comparison, Facebook had 2.9 billion monthly active users as of June, per TechCrunch.

One billion monthly active users is "a remarkable number for a platform ... that has been scrutinized by governments—including the US—that are worried about the data collection practices of its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance," reports the Verge. Former President Trump tried unsuccessfully to ban the app in the US, and it's currently banned in India. Yet TikTok became hugely popular during the pandemic and was the world's most-downloaded app in the first quarter of 2020, with 315 million downloads, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower. The company says downloads have now reached 3.2 billion. Other apps are trying to imitate TikTok's success with their own short-form video products, including Instagram's Reels and Snapchat's Spotlight. (More TikTok stories.)