Insiders Deny ByteDance’s TikTok Has Reached 1B Worldwide Daily Active Users

STAR Market Daily learned from insiders at ByteDance that at 17:31 on October 18, the global daily active users (DAU) of TikTok, an internationally popular short video sharing app owned by ByteDance, had exceeded 1 billion. According to the sources, this huge traffic level triggered a surprise alarm on the company’s user login page. As a result, developers temporarily expanded the capacity to allow new users to access it. Regarding the matter, other company insiders later responded that the news of 1 billion DAUs was untrue.

At present, there are four apps with DAUs that exceed 1 billion in the world – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube – while WeChat, a leading instant social tool owned by Tencent, has DAUs of about 900 million.

SEE ALSO: TikTok Aims to Pass 1B Global Daily Active Users, to Start E-Commerce in Brazil

It is worth mentioning that, according to Chinese media outlet LatePost, TikTok has set a goal of exceeding 1.05 billion DAUs by the end of 2022. Before it exceeded 1 billion days on October 18, the world’s largest short video platform had more than 800 million DAUs.

According to the report, TikTok’s global penetration rate is less than 20%, while its sister app for Chinese mainland market, Douyin, has a penetration rate of nearly 54%. TikTok hopes that the penetration rate in overseas markets will eventually become equivalent to that of Douyin. If TikTok can achieve this goal, its global DAUs should increase by more than 2 billion.

In order to further improve business growth and management efficiency, TikTok began to make some adjustments at its organization this year. Combining several markets under one catagory, the company has compiled six distinct regions: Japan and South Korea, South Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and another region integrating the United States, Canada and Australia. In addition, TikTok also received technical and business support from Douyin.

TikTok and Douyin are becoming popular all over the world. According to data recently released by mobile app research company Sensor Tower, in September 2022, Douyin and TikTok attracted more than $315 million in global app stores, 1.7 times that of the same period last year, and again took first place on the global mobile application (non-game) revenue list. About 49.2% of the income comes from the Chinese version of Douyin; the US market ranked second, contributing 16.6% of revenue; the Japanese market ranked third, accounting for 3.4%.