What was initially laughed at outside China is increasingly developing into a new supercompany with a rapidly growing number of users. We are talking about the video platform TikTok. The platform owes its success to a mixture of attractive content and an almost perfectly developed system of algorithms. The latter ensure that users are shown exactly what suits their user behaviour and interests.
TikTok: A portal with diverse content
If you haven’t yet taken a look at the TikTok portal, you will be overwhelmed by the gigantic number of short videos in which users present themselves in a more or less artistic way. But social and political topics are also increasingly finding their place in the short user videos. It is precisely this diversity of content that has led to a steady increase in the number of users on TikTok in the past. In July, the number of active users who used TikTok via the Android app was more than 32 million.
In total, the portal has around 800 million users with an average usage time of 52 minutes a day. Those who still want to profit from the company’s upward trend should not waste any time and invest in the TikTok share, which is in high demand. download twitter video
The TikTok success story
What is now known worldwide as TikTok began in September 2016 under the name A.me as a video-sharing platform exclusively for Chinese users. After ByteDance bought the start-up Musical.ly with its own similarly designed video platform at the end of 2017, both portals were merged into TikTok in 2018.
Criticism of owner ByteDance
Criticism of TikTok and its suspected data sharing with the Chinese state has come mainly from the US and was fuelled under former President Donald Trump. Members of the US military, for example, have been banned from using the TikTok portal for some time. Current plans of the US government aim at forcing the Chinese company ByteDance to sell the TikTok services for the US. It would then be possible that the services for Canada, New Zealand and Australia would also have to be sold.
However, it must be made clear that even the CIA has not yet been able to find and prove evidence of a large-scale transfer of TikTok user data to the Chinese state. Moreover, ByteDance has already announced that it will defend itself against these plans.
Big Data and AI: TikTok’s success factors
However, it is undisputed that TikTok and other ByteDance services are based on an already very sophisticated artificial intelligence. This ensures that users are served content that is precisely tailored to their needs and user behaviour. Big Data in combination with a highly developed and constantly evolving AI is sometimes viewed critically by foreign governments, data protectionists and other experts. However, this is certainly a significant part of TikTok’s global success.