TikTok Is Rewriting the World
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html
https://www.oberlo.com/blog/tiktok-statistics
TikTok is an app for making and sharing short videos. TikTok acts as a social network, where videos cover a wide range of categories, from lip-syncing to comedic skits to viral challenges. It is easy to make a video on TikTok, users have all sorts of tools at their disposal including filters and an enormous range of sounds. Users are also strongly encouraged to engage with other users through likes and comments. TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in the world.
TikTok was launched in September 2016, and it has exploded in popularity. TikTok has 500 million active users worldwide. TikTok was the third most downloaded app in the first quarter of 2019, with 188 million new users. TikTok is ranked as the most downloaded app in the Apple App Store with 33 million downloads. It has become popular with the younger generation as 41% of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24. An average of 52 minutes per day is spent by users on the app. On a daily basis, 90% of all TikTok users access the app. Not only is the app popular among the younger generation, in less than 18 months the number of US adult users increased by 5.5. Over 1 billion videos are viewed every day. These statistics show that TikTok has been causing a network effect among people all over the world.
In class, we learned that a network effect takes place when for some kinds of decisions, you incur an explicit benefit when you align your behavior with the behavior of others. A natural setting where network effects arise is in the adoption of technologies for which interaction or compatibility with others is important as seen with TikTok. When TikTok was first introduced as an application, its value to a potential user depended on how many others were also using the same application. TikTok is valuable to the extent that other people are using it as well, otherwise, there would not be many videos shared. As seen in the statistics, TikTok has caused a network effect among teenagers and adults.