In a short time, TikTok has become a phenomenon that attracts more and more users – mainly young people – outside the Asian borders. So much so that a new analysis now suggests that the Chinese social network for vertical videos has exceeded the average YouTube viewing time in the United States and the United Kingdom on Android phones.
The data, presented by the BBC, comes from an analysis by App Annie, which takes into account the average time users spend on social networks and which describes the growth of TikTok as a “revolution in the social and streaming landscape.” However, YouTube retains the first place in terms of total time spent .
The latter is due to the fact that YouTube has an estimated 2 billion monthly active users. TikTok, meanwhile, claims to have around 700 million users. Therefore, it could be said that TikTok manages to retain more time from each user who accesses, but YouTube, despite its lower retention, achieves a higher total time thanks to the greater number of users.
The British media indicates that the average viewing time of TikTok exceeded that of YouTube in June 2020 , and has not stopped growing since then. In the United States, Google's video portal surpassed its Chinese competitor in April 2021 . The data, as mentioned at the beginning, corresponds to Android phone users.
YouTube boosts Shorts to deal with TikTok
But YouTube does not want to be left behind and has already made a move. In this sense, the company launched its function called “Shorts” at the end of last year. It is a way of sharing videos in short and vertical format, designed for consumption on mobile phones. It is a proposal very similar to what TikTok offers today.
The user interface that shows one video after another and its advanced recommendation algorithm that keeps improving work in favor of attracting users. Precisely, at the beginning of August TikTok became the most downloaded application in the world, surpassing historical giants of social networks such as Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.
