FOCUS
WHATSAPP
FACEBOOK
TIKTOK
INSTAGRAM
YOUTUBE
SNAPCHAT
AVERAGE MONTHLY
DOWNLOADS OF TOP
SOCIAL APPS
(GLOBAL)
TOP APP DOWNLOADS IN Q1, 2019 (GLOBAL)
73.4 M.
58.7 M.
58.1 M.
36.4 M.
22.5 M.
SOURCE: SENSOR TOWER
17.6 M.
NOTE: DATA INCLUDES DOWNLOADS OF MUSICAL.LY, WHICH WAS FOLDED INTO TIKTOK IN 2018.
24
FORTUNE.COM // JULY 2019
sor Tower. “Unlike on Instagram or YouTube,
which are far beyond their maturation point,
TikTok’s a Wild West.”
Still, with the growth, TikTok is quickly
morphing from its roots in amateurish lip-
synching clips to a destination for more elabo-
rate videos cut with increasingly sophisticated
editing tools. Reenactments of movie comedy
scenes and cooking tutorials are just some of
what’s popular on the app.
But video apps are a particularly fickle busi-
ness, as users inevitably flock to the next big
thing. They’re also notoriously difficult to make
money from—so much so that few, if any, have
ever turned a profit.
Twitter, for example, learned the hard way,
after jumping on the video bandwagon in 2012
by paying $30 million for Vine, a then-hot app
that let users shoot and share six-second clips.
For a short period of time, Vine flourished. But
the fad quickly passed, prompting Twitter to
shutter the service in 2016.
TikTok, which declined to comment for
this article, is owned by ByteDance, a Chi-
nese tech conglomerate founded in 2012 by
former Microsoft engineer Zhang Yiming. The
company’s first product provided users with
a personalized list of news headlines. After a
few more forays into news and entertainment,
Zhang introduced Douyin, a video-sharing app
A VIDEO SUPERSTAR IS BORN
In just a few years, the number of people who have downloaded TikTok has soared. It now ranks among the most downloaded
mobile apps, rivaling powerhouses like Facebook’s constellation of apps.
