You’ve seen the dances and you’ve heard the songs, but do you truly know what goes behind the Chinese app that’s taken over the world?
Since Manila’s months-long lockdown, Internet users have seen an increase in local content creators on the TikTok app. But don’t get it wrong, TikTok’s popularity began years before the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s not hard to imagine how the TikTok that we know today became so popular. Its short-form videos offer easily digestible content to many in Generation Z. Not only that but the videos on the app feature many elements that could easily go viral (including chart-topping songs and trendy dances). There’s also a sense of versatility in what is available; video trends have changed from lip-synch and dance numbers to memes and even quick story narrations.
Read also: Top 7 Fashion Icons To Follow On TikTok
The Birth of TikTok
Because TikTok is so popular in the United States, many people are surprised to find that it is headquartered in China, a country infamously known for Internet censorship. Its history is fairly complex as TikTok is actually the amalgam of two different social media platforms: Musical.ly and Douyin.
Musical.ly may sound familiar to some; it had, after all, skyrocketed to popularity in 2015, less than a year after creators Alex Zhu and Louis Yang founded it in 2014. Musical.ly birthed a new generation of Internet superstars including Loren Grey, Cameron Dallas, and Jacob Sartorius. In 2016, after Vine, an app that also hosted short-form videos, shut down operations, many influencers migrated to Musical.ly and continued to create content there.
Around that time, a short-form video app had also simultaneously been launched in China. Douyin, with its runaway success, garnered 100 million users within a year. As such, its operations expanded abroad and in 2017, became hugely popular in Thailand, Japan, and other Asian markets.
Douyin and its parent company, ByteDance, eventually acquired Musical.ly for a billion dollars in 2017. At first, ByteDance marketed the apps per location: Musical.ly in the United States and TikTok to the global audience. Yet in 2018, ByteDance announced that it would merge both apps, birthing the TikTok we know today.