Tik Tok is the third ranked trend of the world as of November of 2019. It has been in the global top four since June of 2019. It is one of the fastest growing media platforms of the world. 

How did Tik Tok come about you ask?

According to Esquire, Tik Tok’s history begins in 2014 with an app called Musical.ly. Musical.ly was an app launched by two Chinese entrepreneurs, Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. It was created as a simple lip-syncing video platform, but quickly grew to a worth of $1 billion. At the time, ByteDance already owned a version of TikTok and following the acquisition, merged it with Musical.ly, creating a more complete lip-syncing platform. It added all kinds of new features appealing mostly to Gen Z and Millennials.  

Esquire also said when the two were merged it was seen as a way for the Chinese app to enter the US market because Musical.ly was already boasting a considerable American audience.

Tik Tok was created by the company, ByteDance located in Beijing, China. ByteDance is owned by entrepreneur, Yiming Zhang. It was launched by this company in August of 2017 for markets outside of China. 

Tik Tok is an IOS and Android media app used for creating, watching, and sharing short, 15 to 60 second videos soundtracked with music. 

From comedy skits, dancing, lip syncing, to adding filters, stickers, all just to gain likes, comments, and followers. The more views and followers you have the more publicly you will have. 

According to Business of Apps, TikTok was the most downloaded free iOS social media app over the first half of 2019. As of late September 2019, it also became the most-downloaded free app on the Apple App Store in the US, and also ranked first on Google Play since October. 

“I think that their are so many other outlets for creativity,” said junior Abigail Diaz. “And yes, people can be creative on it but it is the same thing over and over, and sooner or later it goes away and then there is no use for it.”

According to Esquire, Tik Tok currently has more downloads than Youtube and Twitter and is worth more than $75 billion dollars. 

Tik Tok described that it is appealed to as the following: “to capture and present the world’s creativity, knowledge, and precious life moments, directly from the mobile phone. Tik Tok enables everyone to be a creator, and encourages users to share their passion and creative expression through their videos.”