The viral video app, TikTok, has gained more audience than the American search engine – Google.
This was revealed in a ranking by Cloudflare, an IT security company. The ranking shows that TikTok had knocked Google out of its top position in February, March and June this year and the viral video app has retained the top position since August.
Cloudfare said it tracks data using its tool, Cloudflare Radar, which monitors web traffic.
In the previous year, Google was at the top position, while a number of sites including TikTok, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix were all in the top 10.
According to a Data Company, Sensor Tower, as at July 2021, TikTok had been downloaded more than 3 billion times.
The social network owned by a Chinese company called Bytedance, was originally released in September 2016 and now has more than one billion active users across the world, and still counting.
In China, in a bid to comply with the country’s censorship rules, the app is called Douyin, and runs on a different network. This year, China made a declaration tha users under the age of 14 would only have access to the platform for only 40 minutes per day.
TikTok was launched internationally in 2018, after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, an app which allowed users to share videos of themselves lip-synching to songs.
However, it is believed that one of the reasons for the rise in Tiktok’s popularity and engagement is because of the COVID-19 pandemic, as people were stuck at home and looking for entertainment.
