TikTok surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube in downloads last month | Hacker News Reader

TikTok surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube in downloads last month

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95 pointsRobertSmith57 comments

Maybe it surpassed downloads because almost everyone in the planet already has FB, YouTube, etc. installed, and not as many has TikTok installed? So I don't see how this metric is really that impressive.

When it's the strongest signal you have in your business, as an entrepreneur you've got to sell it. And in self-interest, TechCrunch wants to help sell the story so they're going to use the strongest signal the business will give them to validate relevancy.

Those are likely the mechanics at play when the result is a title like that.

Like you're saying, it's not really impressive, but it's probably the most interesting thing about the business (fortunately or unfortunately).

I wonder about the rate of reinstallations though. Over a month, some steady percentage of users is changing phones and reinstalling apps. If a new app is able to beat the (new installs + %reinstalls) of giant apps, that's impressive.

If the app stores don't count reinstalls as downloads, then, well, sorry you wasted your time reading this

Some phones have these apps preinstalled. I never used Facebook but I can't fully uninstall it from my Samsung Galaxy phone.

I think surprasing facebook, snapchat and instagram in monthly downloads is still impressive. Maybe you just mean that it isn't impressive enough to have you believe that TikTok is going to dethrone FB. I can get behind that. But if I were the founder of TikTok, I'd be well impressed with myself at the moment. :)

I’d say it’s pretty relevant. The ad-funded tech giants are valued based on continued exponential revenue growth. This can be accomplished by a combination of growth in user count and average revenue per user (ARPU). Both of these factors are supposed be present. A small % annual user growth for Google or FB is tens of millions of users. TikTok beating that from a much smaller base is impressive and the monthly graph from the article highlights that Google and FB are probably not getting exponential user growth.

I think people generally don't quite grasp that Facebook has 2.27 billion monthly active users. Which is, you know, only a third of the human race alive today.

Facebook is still adding ~100M registered users a quarter- that's no small feat.

I really despise TikTok, from the limited experience I’ve had with it (namely, someone sent me a TikTok video). They do this thing where they watermark your video with the company’s logo in the corner, but also make it vibrate, making it impossible to not focus on it instead of the video (oh, and it moves around between corners to make it harder to remove or ignore). In my mind, that’s a warning sign saying the company cares more about their brand being noticed than their user content seen.

The logo has the username as well. I assumed it's to prevent people from copying and taking credit for other people's work. (That said, I do see these videos with the logo cropped out)

That said, I still see no reason why there needs to be a company logo or why the logo needs to vibrate.

It's much harder to automatically remove if it isn't static.

I assume you're one of the only people in the world bothered by the logo vibrating.

I assume over a dozen people agree with me, since that's how many upvotes I have. I think a strong aversion to anything in the corner that moves is pretty universal–there's a reason why <blink> and <marquee> have been phased out.

Are you kidding?. Of course that is shit for almost everyone. Animation on a page is one of the main motivators for adblock.

Only it's not a static page, it's a video: everything in it moves.

Things move in real life too. We’re almost hardwired to look at things that move in a sudden or erratic way.

I think the reason is pretty simple, the App's original name is 抖(shake)音(music), so the logo needs to shake. :)

> TikTok surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat & YouTube in downloads last month

This is not very relevant. The comparison will make sense in 5 years from now. If after months and years TikTok still gets more downloads then it's a game changer. Otherwise to compare them makes no much sense without a lot of interpretation.

People do not install Facebook each day. They install it when they get a new phone. But a new app will be installed in all preexisting phones.

This happens all the time. One app goes up in the charts as it becomes a new thing. Then it goes out of fashion. And in the end, the number of uninstalls is greater than the number of installs. Then the app disappears from the charts. But Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, etc. are still there the next month.

I think it's significant in that its a rebrand of a Chinese consumer internet application for the international market that has succeeded beyond expectation. Of course it's progeny includes previous short form video apps Vine, Music.ly, etc. But TikTok's infinite scroll of 15 second, algorithmically curated, auto play videos has proven addictive. And they can pretty much deliver any type of content in this user mode: news, episodic, live. At 100M install base and 100 daily average views. Ad revenue generate rates could be phenomenal ;)

If of course they don't deliberately cook their numbers – something that even tier 1 companies in China been caught doing.

I.e. Baidu's custom search pages, they cost brands millions of bucks per year, but Baidu was still buying buying bot traffic by itself to draw up some semblance of it being worth it for companies! Imagine Facebook hiring people to click on its own ads.

Another ad company... Can't we come up with a less manipulative business model.

I saw people in many Chinese forums react the same way as HN folks here. And they (or we) became more and more surprised when Tik Tok continued to gain ground when none of us got it. In the end all it proved is that “we” lost connect to the common folks.

From what I've seen of it, isn't it basically the exact same thing as Vine?

Why the hell did Vine ever shut down anyway? It seemed like it was doing well.

It was popular, but didn't generate revenues. It's not enough for a website to be popular, you have to figure out how to get people to give you their money.

Yep, plenty of flotsam and detritus amid failures to launch. Look at sites like Friendster. Why did friendster ٭die?

Failure to scale infrastructure in a cost effective way that matched it's growth curve. Also, Friendster failed to adapt and develop features that resonated with emergent user activity. Within a year or two, other players emerged to eat its lunch.

٭ ...and when I say "die," I mean decay into near total disuse and irrelevance by the end of 2004.

TikTok has some of the worst misleading and bizarre advertisements all over the internet. I'm kind of curious what their advertising budget is at this point.

Chinese funded, so essentially infinite

What’s misleading? I’ve seen a metric buttload of their ads on YouTube but I know basically nothing about it beyond that.

Heavy sexualization in ads (for an app targetted 13-17 demographic, not to mention the amount of predator behaviour in Musically pre-merge/acquisition in general) vaguely reminiscent of the "play now, my lord" times, fake X-out/buttons, incessant screaming/volume differences, abuse-esque ads (child voice begging for help + black eyes, etc)

The ads contain content that would get YouTube uploaders demonetised and suspended.

Ever since it popped up on my radar I've had that same associated with shady, scumbag marketing. I can't believe it's taking off, ffs...

I think that "taking off" is relative. We don't really know how much they are spending on ads at the moment to get all these installs, but I can tell you it's A LOT of money. This is not organic growth, and generally paying your way to the top doesn't work long-term.

Strangely, I've never seen Tik Tok ads, care to show me what they look like.

>Heavy sexualization in ads (for an app targetted 13-17 demographic

You should see the Snapchat discover tab (or whatever it's called). It's simply vile.

Do you means the adds for the app seen elsewhere are strange, or that the adds you see in their app are weird?

ads not adds.

I'd bet the majority of the money was spent on recruiting the e-celebs to the platform.

The Chinese internet has adequately introduced a new "proverb" summarizing Tiktok's popularity: 【南抖音北快手，智障界两泰斗】

Which essentially means: Tiktok in the South, Kuaishou [1] of the North, Two titans in a world of dumb-asses.

[1] Kuaishou is a major competitor to Tiktok and is popular in Northern China, Russia and Eastern Europe.

Of note is that Tiktok founder started off with news recommendation app Toutiao.

What even is TikTok and why do I keep getting ads for it? And what do these weird ass ads even mean????

Installs is a vanity metric, the more interesting metric in consumer social is retention numbers like d30, d60, and beyond. If they're able to keep users onboard for long periods of time, TikTok becomes a threat to incumbents.

Yay, another time waster Platform

I'm kind of curious as to why the more established platforms are seeing multiple millions of downloads a month. Are people uninstalling apps and reinstalling them frequently?

If you have a billion users, and each one of them replaces a device every 10 years, that's 8+ million downloads a month just due to device replacements.

https://www.tiktok.com/

How am I supposed to know why I should install this app based on the landing page?

The whole ad campaign this company runs is void of any info. I'm not surprised that their website is the same.

I was pissed when their flashing (soundless) screamer ads made it through my ad filters and they had no info beyond the company name and a big "RECOMMENDED" stamped at the bottom, as if that means something. There was no way in hell I was clicking a link like that, but I guess I'm just not the target market since it's clearly been working very well on other people.

Because you're curious what the mysterious app could be.

I bet you totally looked it up and their marketing strategy worked exactly the way it's supposed to (especially for their younger audience).

Nah, I didn't, but I imagine others did.

Its for younger audience, just go talk to kids in the neighborhood. TikTok beats Instagaram.

People don't access it through the website, they access it through the app store listings (where there is more information)

It spreads through word of mouth through younger users.

Seems like a fad to me. I wonder if/when Instagram will replicate the lip-syncing feature. I personally am not attracted to the app at all and find the videos pretty toe-curling. But I'm curious to see how far it goes.

Another thought - TikTok seems to be really popular with young teens. I wonder if Douyin (the version for China) appeals to the same age demographic and if users are doing more with the app than the lip-sync

I guess they are similar, but Douyin in China has much more diverse content, covering food/skits, or just funny video in general, while US version seems more heavily focused on dancing/lip-sync.

TikTok is pretty Douyin, but an international version.

TikTok there is 2 versions the chinese version is not available in Playstore. i had to download the apk from their website

Sounds equivalent to GMV crap/hype to me. I hope this will excite investors and FOMO takes on. :D

Damn it Cody Ko!

The only reason I know what this app is!

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