The Road to One Billion Users

At the end of last month, TikTok announced that it had reached one billion monthly active users. The popular short video platform joined other social media applications such as Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram, which have already surpassed this mark. Launched to the international market in 2016, TikTok has taken just over five years to reach one billion active users. Only one service on a list by news website Axios got there faster – Facebook Messenger achieved the feat in just under five years.

However, before its spin-off into a separate app, Facebook Messenger was part of the regular Facebook app and website, meaning that before its launch, it had already amassed many users among the regular Facebook clientele, who now had to download the Messenger app if they wanted to use the service on their phone. This certainly gave Facebook Messenger a bit of a head start in terms of users, pushing it across the line of one billion MAUs more quickly.

The leading network worldwide in number of monthly active users is currently Facebook, which in its last quarterly report claimed some 2.9 billion users by the end of June 2021. Even though TikTok still would need to triple its user base to achieve that, it can boast that it took 3.6 fewer years to get to one billion users than Facebook did back in the day.