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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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