ByteDance, the Beijing-based startup behind famous TikTok brief video platform, has accumulated over one billion active monthly customers across its applications.
At this week’s Shanghai Film Festival, a business executive announced the milestone. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for ByteDance verified his comments to CNN Business, stating previously this year the billion mark was crossed.
ByteDance is the platform to many other apps too
ByteDance has over a dozen applications including Jinri Toutiao news aggregator, Top Buzz trend video platform, and FaceU selfie app.
According to market research company Sensor Tower, TikTok has been the most downloaded app in Apple’s (AAPL) App Store for five consecutive quarters since March. Overall, for the first three months of this year, it was the third most downloaded app in the world.
In February, Sensor Tower said the video platform reached 1 billion downloads globally, of which almost 100 million came from the U.S. and 250 million came from India.
The success of ByteDance has drawn large investors, including SoftBank (SFTBY) tech kingmaker. SoftBank’s money injection allegedly valued ByteDance at $75 billion early last year, making it the most precious start-up in the world ahead of The We Company, WeWork owners, and Juul e-cigarette.
However, it wasn’t all soft sailing.
In February, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission struck TikTok with a record fine to collect information on kids under the age of 13. The fine linked to Musical.ly, a Bytedance video sharing app purchased in 2017 and merged last August with TikTok.
In India, in April, TikTok was taken from app stores because of allegations that it made kids susceptible to pornographic and other inappropriate material. After two weeks, the ban was lifted after ByteDance effectively appealed the judgment of the tribunal.
And while a billion users are an amazing achievement for the seven-year-old company, ByteDance is still far behind Facebook (FB), which has over 5 billion active monthly customers including its WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram platforms.
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