TikTok Says It Has over 1 Billion Users

For its part, the Google subsidiary launched YouTube Shorts, deployed in more than 100 countries in mid-July, to compete with TikTok in the short format segment.

The ByteDance subsidiary, whose equivalent in China is called Douyin, nevertheless remains well behind YouTube, which claimed 2.3 billion monthly active users in 2020.

TikTok is now looking to monetize more of its platform’s traffic, something it was slow to do in its early days.

The social network accelerated into advertising last year and launched a new feature in late August 2021 that allows its users to directly purchase products offered on the platform by content creators.