The History of TikTok

Source: Dana Galo I TikTok's Origin

Who else remembers when former United States President Donald Trump was threatening to ban TikTok unless an American company bought it? That was certainly an unusual situation; an app held so much power that the leader of the U.S. was actually threatened by it… well, that’s just the power of TikTok, the fastest growing social media app in the world.

TikTok became popular in December of 2018 as an outlet for users to create and share 15 second videos that could then amass millions of views. Today, the app is used primarily by Gen-Z as a social media platform for short-form videos of users singing, telling stories, highlighting trending topics, dancing, comedy, and much more. Videos posted on Tiktok can now be up to three minutes long.

The TikTok brand was not an overnight success. It initially began in 2014 under the app name Musical.ly, which was also a short-form 15 second video sharing app. Unlike the variety of content we see available today on TikTok, Musical.ly was mainly about music. Users were able to lip sync to an assortment of music and dialogue options to post. These videos created on the app were then also shared across other social media platforms, like Instagram and Twitter, which helped to grow the app’s popularity even more.

Source: Dana Galo I Statistics from Statista

In August of 2018, Musical.ly was sold by its creators to the Chinese company ByteDance, and all users on Mucial.ly were transferred onto a new app called “TikTok.” After that rebranding, TikTok blew up. Now, Tiktok is used by over 1 billion (yes, billion) people each month, and it's still growing. Youtube launched ‘Shorts’ in September 2021 to try to compete, while Snapchat released ‘Spotlight,’ and Facebook and Instagram developed ‘Reels.” Each of these brands are desperately trying to compete with TikTok’s popularity and profit from the world’s obsession for short videos, but TikTok remains far ahead. The major difference is TikTok’s favorable algorithm, which essentially quickly learns what users like and don’t like to curate the ideal ‘For You Page.’ Users can follow specific creators, but there is almost no need, since the creators they love already pop up on their timelines and the content they have engaged with prompts the algorithm to provide them with similar content. Additionally, the seemingly endless database of songs, filters, and audio clips from movies, television shows, interviews, etc. is hard to compete with.

The For You Page algorithm determines what content goes viral and gets shared to other users’ individually crafted For You Pages. While other platforms like Instagram or Twitter have perpetuated the dream for a user to post a tweet or a photo to completely blow up to get millions of likes and shares, the TikTok algorithm makes that happen frequently, and not just based on someone's follower count, but on the quality of the content itself. This not only encourages content creators to keep posting but also keeps users continually checking their For You Page because it's constantly updating with new and fresh videos from anywhere and everywhere.