INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Beijing-based ByteDance 2017 acquisition of tween and teen-focused social app Musical.ly is paying off
The company this year merged Musical.ly with its own short video app TikTok as a means of entering the U.S
Today, the result of that merger is sitting at the top of the U.S
App Store, ahead of Facebook
More importantly, it recently surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat in monthly installs for the first time in
September.
According to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, TikTok installs were higher than those of Facebook, Instagram,
Snapchat and YouTube in the U.S
last month.
It surpassed the four other apps in terms of daily downloads on September 29, with 29.7 percent the downloads from this cohort
of apps, the firm says.
Since then, it has continued to increase its market share among this group of apps, reaching as high as 42.4
percent of downloads among the apps just days ago, on October 30.
In September, TikTok installs grew around 31 percent from the prior month
to reach approximately 3.81 million on the App Store and Google Play combined
2 Facebook, which had 3.53 million first-time installs.
Year-over-year, TikTok U.S
installs were up 237 percent from 1.13 million in October 2017.
As floods of new users join TikTok, the app has also flirted with passing
some of these leading social apps in the App Store Top Charts, at times, too
Today, it ahead of Facebook (No
But it behind YouTube (No
3).
However, at other times it gotten as high as No
3 in the Overall Free Apps Top Chart, according to App Annie data.
App researcher Apptopia reports similar findings, in terms of TikTok
However, it noted that the app engagement rates (the portion of monthly users who open the app daily) was still behind the rest of the group
Apptopia said TikTok had a 29 percent engagement rate, compared with Facebook 96 percent, Instagram 95 percent, Snapchat 95 percent and
YouTube 95 percent.
It also noted the app gains have come, in part, from increased ad spend across Facebook, Google mobile ad platform
AdMob, in-app ad platform Vungle and others
Other gains are attributed to the merger.
In June, TikTok (known as Douyin in China) reported reaching a global monthly active user count of
500 million across 150 countries and regions, which is around the time when Instagram reached one billion monthly actives, for comparison
