India highest contributor to TikTok’s 1.5 billion downloads

Short-video app TikTok has achieved a milestone of 1.5 billion downloads worldwide with India contributing one-third at 466.8 million downloads. This comes just nine months after the Bytedance-owned app crossed 1 billion downloads, making it one of the fastest-growing platforms across the globe.

This year alone, the app accumulated 614 million downloads of which India formed 45% of overall downloads at 277.6 million. Interestingly, Bytedance’s home turf China has received second place in terms of TikTok’s downloads - accounting for 173.2 million or 11.5%. This report by mobile intelligence firm Sensor Tower also stated that the China figures did not include installs from third-party Android stores.

India and China were followed by the United States, which contributed 123.8 million downloads or 8.2%. The US government had recently launched a national security review of the app.  

The development comes on the back of TikTok’s growing usesbase in India, which recently hit 200 million mark. Its market share also grew by 13% in the period January 2018 to August 2019, ahead of social media giants Facebook and Twitter, revealed a separate report by Kalagato.

The duo lost over 40% of their market share in this period.

The 15-second video app has also witnessed a sharp increase in average time spent by users. On average, a user spent 34 minutes on TikTok every day. Despite TikTok’s growing popularity, Facebook still stands first with users daily spending 44 minutes on an average. 

Surprisingly, Likee, owned by Bytedance-rival YY Inc., emerged as the third social media platform to gain user time. Another Bytedance-owned social media app Helo, a clone of India’s ShareChat, was placed at fifth position in the list.

After garnering an Indian user’s attention, TikTok is now looking at monetising through ads. It also started testing social commerce on its platform by allowing select users to add links of e-commerce sites to their profile biography.

Leveraging numerous influencers and viral videos on the platform, several e-commerce players are using TikTok as a medium to promote and market their exclusive products.

Taking a cue from TikTok’s growing popularity, Facebook-owned Instagram is also testing a similar feature called Reels which allows its users to create 15-second video clips. It is currently available in Brazil.