Growing acceptance of TikTok, worries Facebook and Youtube

Growing acceptance of TikTok is going to give stiff competition to YouTube by 2024. The Chinese-owned video platform is set to overtake the advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined, despite TikTok being launched globally 12 years after its Google-owned rival. TikTok, which was banned in India in June 2020 along with several Chinese apps in the first lot, is likely to triple its global worldwide ad revenues $11.6 billion this year -- more than $10.44 billion for Snapchat and Twitter combined. The forecast is going to catch up with YouTube by 2024 when both are predicted to take $23.6bn in ad revenue, reports The Guardian.

In 2021, social video app TikTok had approximately 78.7 million users in the United States. This figure is projected to increase by around eight percent year-over-year, reaching 84.9 million users in 2022. TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media apps in the United States and especially popular with younger digital audiences. Meanwhile, TikTok emerged as the top grossing non-game app in Q1 2022, generating $821 million in consumer spending in the quarter.

On Google Play, it came second to Google One, which topped the chart with nearly $250 million, according to Sensor Tower. A Washington Post report late last month claimed that Meta allegedly paid a prominent Republican consulting firm to malign TikTok. According to the report, Meta ran a nationwide campaign to sow distrust about one of the company's top competitors, TikTok.

Facebook has been losing users for quite some time while TikTok's usage is rising in the US. An estimate says, that TikTok has about 80 million monthly active users in the United States. 60% are female, 40% are male. 60% are between the ages of 16-24. The company is winning the battle for the “sweet spot” of social media users, those in the 18- to 25-year-old demographic where Facebook is seeing its biggest declines, with parent company Meta trying to stem the exodus by attracting them to stablemate Instagram.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta still dominates the market – Facebook has 2.9 billion monthly active users, and Instagram another 2 billion, with Insider Intelligence putting their 2024 ad revenues at $85bn and $82bn respectively. Even so, it emerged last month that fear of TikTok had led it to hire a lobbying firm to paint the company as the “real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app. Meta clearly sees itself in a battle against TikTok for the hearts, minds and attention spans of millennials, a significant chunk of the social media market.

Experts say TikTok is the one growing fastest right now, and has scale. TikTok users spent $840m on its virtual “coins” currency, which can be used to “tip” creators and promote videos, in the first quarter – up 40% year on year. It is estimated that TikTok is now the most lucrative app in the world for in-app purchases.