According to the latest report by analytics firm App Annie , the Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok is so widely used that its users now prefer it as a hobby to alternatives such as YouTube, Facebook and Netflix . The coronavirus pandemic played an essential role in prevailing and it finally appears that it has.
TikTok is the app we spend the most time on
The popularity of TikTok is constantly growing , and to prove it are all the news that goes viral around challenges that are discovered through the videos that are published on this platform, in addition to dances, music and of course, even people who they become “influencers” or even celebrities (the tiktoker Khaby Lame is one of their most recent examples). But it is not only that: the famous application is currently so widely used that its users prefer it as a hobby to alternatives such as YouTube, Facebook and Netflix.
Comparison with other applications
The data comes from the analysis company App Annie and refers to the American and English public, but it is still significant considering that the habits of this user segment are similar to those of the European public. In the areas covered by the survey, it was found that users spend on average more time on the Chinese platform for sharing than on the more “mainstream” applications or platforms, which have literally dominated the online entertainment scene in recent years. From 2019 to 2021, the average number of hours spent on TikTok went from 12.8 hours per month to 24 hours and a half , reaching 26 hours in the UK; In comparison, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network only has 17.5 hours of use per month.
The role the pandemic has played
Comparison with other platforms makes it even clearer that TikTok is now the “queen” among platforms: in the United States, Instagram is consulted less than 7 hours a month and much less seems to use WhatsApp, while Netflix has established itself among American users with an average of 5 hours per month . The only online platform that, according to App Annie, can still defend against TikTok is still YouTube , where users spend an average of 22 hours each month. And that is where it seems clear that the coronavirus pandemic certainly caused people to spend much more time consuming videos of all kinds (especially tutorials or humorous videos) than sitting down to watch a series, a movie or start browsing Facebook.
Let’s not forget the confinement where people had to spend hours exercising, cooking, dancing or also being inspired by challenges that distract them and get them out of all the news about the pandemic. And where has all this been found? Well, precisely on TikTok (as well as on YouTube) where videos of just a few minutes were better accepted and it seems that they will continue to be so, although the forecasts that TikTok itself has is that it will continue to grow in the coming months.
