TikTok hits 1 billion monthly users worldwide

Beijing: The popular video-sharing app, TikTok has hit 1 billion monthly active users globally over summer, just four years after the app was launched by Chinese group ByteDance.

The popular video-sharing platform has seen a surge in users, with a large amount of its audience joining from United States (US) amidst COVID outbreak.

✨ 1 billion✨ people on TikTok! Thank you to our global community ? https://t.co/X7FjwpTI0B

— TikTok (@tiktok_us) September 27, 2021

The video platform has gained more than 300 million users since July 2020, the last time the company had reported user numbers.

Initially built on the principle of 15-second videos, the platform raised the time limit to 3 minutes in early July to attract a wider audience in a bid to compete YouTube.

The video platform, known as Douyin in China, nevertheless remains well behind YouTube, which claimed 2.3 billion monthly active users in 2020.

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

In 2020, the platform accelerated into advertising and launched a new feature in late August— allowing users to directly purchase products offered by several content creators.