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TikTok, known in China as Douyin (Chinese: 抖音; pinyin: Dǒuyīn), is a video-sharing focused social networking service owned by Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts a variety of short-form user videos, from genres like dance, comedy, and education, with durations from 15 seconds to three minutes.It is an international version of Douyin, originally released in the Chinese market in September 2016. TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018.

TikTok
Douyin
抖音
ByteDance
Initial release
September 2016; 5 years ago
Stable release
21.6.5 / 18 October 2021
Operating system
iOS, Android
Size
442.5 MB (iOS)
88.0 MB (Android)
Available in
40 languages
List of languages
Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Cebuano, Czech, Dutch, English, Filipino, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Korean, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

Video sharing
License
Proprietary software with Terms of Use
Website
tiktok.com
douyin.com
Douyin
Chinese
抖音
Literal meaning
"Vibrating sound"
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyin Dǒuyīn
IPA [tòu.ín]

TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available. The two products are similar, but features are not identical. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them and other features such as buying, booking hotels and making geo-tagged reviews.Since its launch in 2016, TikTok/Douyin rapidly gained popularity in East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the USA, Turkey, Russia, and other parts of the world. As of October 2020, TikTok surpassed over 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide.

Morning Consult ranked TikTok as the third fastest growing brand of 2020, after only Zoom and Peacock.

Features and trends
Influencer marketing
TikTok has provided a platform for users to create content not only for fun, but also for money. As the platform has grown significantly over the past few years, it has allowed companies to advertise and rapidly reach their intended demographic through influencer marketing.The platform's AI algorithm also contributes to the influencer marketing potential, as it picks out content according to the user's preference.Sponsored content is not as prevalent on the platform as it is on other social media apps, but brands and influencers still can make as much as they would if not more in comparison to other platforms. Influencers on the platform who earn money through engagement, such as likes and comments, are referred to as "meme machines".
In 2021, The New York Times reported that viral TikTok videos by young people relating the emotional impact of books on them, tagged with the label "BookTok", significantly drove sales of literature. Publishers were increasingly using the platform as a venue for influencer marketing.

User characteristics and behavior
See also: List of most-followed TikTok accounts
Demographics
Globally, 44% of TikTok users are female while 56% are male.[citation needed] TikTok's geographical use has shown that 43% of new users are from India. TikTok tends to appeal to younger users, as 41% of its users are between the ages of 16 and 24. Among these TikTok users, 90% say they use the app daily.As of July 2020, there were over 90 million monthly active users in the United States alone.

Use by businesses
In October 2020, the ecommerce platform Shopify added TikTok to its portfolio of social media platforms, allowing online merchants to sell their products directly to consumers on TikTok.

Some small businesses have used TikTok to advertise and to reach an audience wider than the geographical region they would normally serve. The viral response to many small business TikTok videos has been attributed to TikTok's algorithm, which shows content that viewers at large are drawn to, but which they are unlikely to actively search for (such as videos on unconventional types of businesses, like beekeeping and logging).

Collab houses
Popular TikTok users have lived collectively in collab houses, predominately in the Los Angeles area.

Censorship of TikTok
Donald Trump–TikTok controversy
2020–2021 eventmixed media animals people plants places of interest beauty in motion worldwide travel and art tiktok inspired