TikTok
What is it?
TikTok is, in essence, a service for sharing short-form videos with friends. It’s a lot more than that, as we’ll get to, but it’s also the key service which has helped make Chinese parent company Bytedance into the world’s most valuable tech startup, trumping even the mighty Uber with a value of over $75 billion.
How is that possible?
That’s a very good question, and one we can only really answer with some big statistics. TikTok (a merger of Bytedance’s original Chinese social network, Douyin, and musical.ly, purchased by the company in 2017) is immensely popular with young people the world over, netting more downloads than Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram in the US. It has been downloaded some 80 million times in the US alone.
That’s…
