According to a recent report from app analytics firm, App Annie, TikTok users have surpassed YouTube users in monthly watchtime in the US. TikTok first took over YouTube last year in August, however, starting this year in June of 2021, TikTok users are reported to be watching over 24 hours of content per month, compared to YouTube users watching about 22 hours per month. In the United Kingdom, the difference is way larger, with TikTok users watching 26 hours of content per month and YouTube users only watching 16. The current App Annie statistics only show data from Android users, and it is unclear whether iOS users also follow this trend.
There are several reasons that these statistics are somewhat surprising. TikTok only offers video uploads of up to 3 minutes in length, while many YouTube users can upload videos that are 10 minutes or longer. Earlier in the year TikTok also faced threats that it may be banned in the US, although President Biden formally revoked Trump’s executive order in June of this year.
Despite the recent statistics YouTube is still ahead in time spent overall, and still has over 2 billion users while TikTok sits at about 700 million. On Androids, the time spent on “Social and Entertainment Apps” throughout the first half of this year has been ranked as YouTube, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and lastly TikTok.
