TikTok’s Unprecedented Rise To Popularity

TikTok was officially launched at the end of 2016, although it existed in a different form (available only to Chinese users) even before that. The app struggled to gain traction until its parent company bought a popular competitor (musical.ly) in that same year, and then merged the two social media platforms into a “new” TikTok that debuted in the summer of 2018.

The combined strengths of the two apps made the relaunched social app a real player almost immediately — but it was in the following two years that TikTok’s popularity skyrocketed, reaching the one billion user mark and challenging for a top-five industry ranking.

Here’s a brief look at how TikTok came to be, and how it became a top-five social platform worldwide.

The Origins of TikTok

ByteDance, a Chinese-owned company, introduced a social media app called A.me in the fall of 2016 and renamed it Douyin a few months later. The platform focused on short-form videos, and within 18 months it had overtaken the industry leader, Kuaishou to become the number-one Chinese app with 150 million daily active users.

Douyin was only available in China, and even the very early success of the platform convinced ByteDance to quickly launch a worldwide version of Douyin, named TikTok. The global product was introduced to the market toward the end of 2016. It languished, though.

Late in 2017, ByteDance spent one billion dollars to purchase another Chinese-owned “short video” competitor, musical.ly, whose innovative features had caught on quickly in the worldwide market. ByteDance promised that the apps would operate separately, but ten months later, it was announced that musical.ly and TikTok would merge.

And that’s when TikTok was put on the path to impressive growth.

TikTok’s Popularity Surge

The Douyin infrastructure and platform that TikTok was built on was outstanding, but the app was missing two things: some of the cool features musical.ly had developed — and a large number of users.

The 200 million musical.ly users were seamlessly moved to the “new” TikTok, immediately making the app a strong competitor.

Musical.ly’s most popular and groundbreaking features, like video feeds customized for each user’s viewing history, filters and other innovative editing techniques, and trending video rankings, were incorporated into the reborn TikTok.Musical.ly’s existing partnerships with major record labels and entertainment networks were also important factors in content generation.

TikTok users loved the new app, and word spread quickly. The merger occurred in August of 2018; by the end of the year, TikTok had nearly doubled the 200 million users it started with and was the most downloaded app in America.

It could be argued that the platform truly became “popular” in 2019 or 2020. TikTok’s user base soared 88% to 653 million users by the end of 2019, and registered nearly 60% growth during 2020 to reach the billion-user mark and become the sixth most popular social app in the world.

TikTok remains a top-five platform today with about two billion users globally, approaching the levels of Instagram and WhatsApp. Its growth between the 2018 launch of the merged TikTok/musical.ly app and the end of 2020, however, was unprecedented — and signaled TikTok’s emergence as one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.