Youtube vs tiktok who will win?
In the beginning there was YouTube, and YouTubereigned supreme in the realms of video sharing. Then not so long ago a new application cameonto the scene, something you could say was a “David” to the “Goliath” of YouTube. It’s name was TikTok. This once little app has experienced whatyou might call a meteoric rise, not only in its home base of China, but all over the world. TikTok is now a Goliath itself, but will itever be bigger than YouTube? That’s the question we are asking today.
Before we get all statistical on you, youshould know something about the two products. They are alike, and also not alike. If you’re not a TikTok fan, we need to explainto you how it works. It’s more of a do it yourself app than YouTube,that’s one main thing. Users can create short video clips, but thereason it’s so popular with people is the fact they can edit those clips and get creative. They can star in their own short clips, andby using the editing features they can do things like slow up or speed down time, andthey can do this to music.
They can also use augmented reality, and userscan get very creative with this technology. So, TikTok is more like social media withartistic expression. Kind of like an Instagram for video, withpeople commenting on the short productions that have been created by the users. They become stars in their homemade shows,some of which have been quite skillfully edited. Part of its popularity has been creating memesand trends that people follow and then add their own version. So, you might have seen things like the hashtag“pillow challenge” or the hashtag bottle cap challenge or the pose challenge. It’s all pretty simplistic, but people can’tget enough of it.
The numbers don’t lie. YouTube is a different beast altogether. You might go to YouTube to watch lengthy videosinvolving people paying games. You might watch newsreels from 1976. You might listen to podcasts on science, crime,sports, or whatever else takes your fancy. You might go to YouTube to be educated, tolaugh, or for some people, to watch sports games from the past. In short, in terms of content, YouTube ismore like a universe while TikTok is merely a star…although a very bright star.
TikTok was launched in China in 2016 and hada couple of names before it actually became TikTok. One of those was “Douyin” and after onlyone year of being out it had 100 million users and a staggering one billion video views perday. In 2017, it hit the international market andsoon became the number one downloaded app in a lot of countries. As we speak, it has around 800 million activeusers around the world, and it's been downloaded around 80 million times in the USA alone. Overall, it has been downloaded around twobillion times. In February of 2020 alone it was downloaded113 million times. People can’t get enough of it, althoughbecause it’s from China some government officials in the U.S. have asked if TikTokcould be a Chinese government surveillance weapon. Given the habit of the Chinese government,which is always concerned with censorship, to embed government employees in senior positionsof powerful companies, it’s a good bet that TikTok has some Chinese government links.
Videos on Tibet or Taiwan are frequently flaggedand deleted, though the real question is if this is happening outside of China as well. Its owner, Bytedance, has said a million timesthat users or governments don’t have anything to fear, but the Department of Defense isn’tbuying it. In terms of global downloads, there was onlyone mobile app that was downloaded more in 2019. Can you guess what that was…Yep, you’reright, it was WhatsApp. Tik Tok is available in 154 countries andin 39 languages, but what’s also quite incredible is the fact that when something is posted,on average it has a higher engagement rate than both Instagram and Twitter.
People who have it, love it, and the statstell us that 90 percent of users will go to the app multiple times in a day. The company Bytedance is now valued at $78billion...not bad for a company that bought an app that was made in just 200 days. Ok, so TikTok has taken over the world, butwe must remember that the world is big enough for many different apps. There’s no reason why a person can’t dividetheir time on various platforms. There's one particular platform that is usedby 44 percent of people that regularly use the Internet, and it is called YouTube. Google wisely bought YouTube for $1.65 billionin 2006. That was a really smart acquisition, as youwill soon find out. .People spend hours and hours watching movies and documentaries on YouTube, or genuinelyeducating themselves by listening to mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, or channels thatmake animations out of factual stories. Users tune into their favorite YouTube stars,their favorite channels, and there is a mind-bogglingly massive variety of content. You might feel like watching an InfographicsShow video in the morning, and then decide you want to watch Joe Rogan talk about viruseswith someone in the afternoon. At night you don’t know what you want towatch and end up watching small creatures fight.
Centipede vs scorpion fights seem to be popular. 5.4 million people have watched just one ofthose fights. YouTube is full of nonsense and brillianceand everything in between, and if millions of people watch animal fights, then we canexpect that YouTube videos in general have been watched many, many times. YouTube creators have created content thatis arguably better than some content on TV. Some channels are not only educational, butalso original and sometimes groundbreaking. These channels filled a hole... they fittedinto a space that was needed in this world. TV wasn’t offering enough, and YouTube hashelped creative individuals to excel and build businesses.
As you probably know, some of the more popularchannels are making millions of dollars. Have you heard of a young boy named Ryan Kaji? There’s a video of him playing on an inflatablewater slide and it has been watched over 1.9 billion times. Yes, you heard that right. Last year his channel made $26 million. Sure, a video on TikTok got 17.9 million likeslast year, but this is not remotely in the same league as some YouTube videos. Plenty of videos on YouTube have several billionviews. TikTok has made a dent in the world, but YouTubehas changed it. So, what are the current YouTube stats? Well, we can look at the top channels andit is unbelievable how much their content has been viewed.
T-Series videos have been viewed 105,162,784,257times. PewDiePie, a one man army for the most part, has had his videos viewed 25,187,812,649 times. The channel you are watching right now hasover two billion video views. Thanks for watching people!.YouTube has over 1.9 billion active monthly users, and it’s expected that by the year2025 much more of the world will be opting out of TV and turning to platforms like YouTube. Every month, 90% of Americans aged 18-24 yearolds use YouTube, while 80 percent of Americans aged 18-49 will watch YouTube. Just on mobile, more 18-49 year olds watchYouTube than any broadcast or cable TV network, in the USA at least. The platform has launched in 91 countriesand can be used in 80 languages. This has made it the most visited platformin the world after Google.com.
Every single minute of the day around 500hours of video are uploaded to YouTube and one billion hours of content is watched onYouTube every day. That’s more than Netflix and Facebook together. And unlike TikTok, YouTube viewers on averagewatch content for 40 minutes. Just on mobile, one billion videos are viewedevery day. In total, around five billion different videosare viewed each day on YouTube. And if you look at data as to why people goto this platform, well, it’s not just to watch someone kicking a bottle cap. Most people go there to learn something aboutthe world or to find out how to do something. About 20 percent of people are there to lookat products and about 30 percent go there to pass time…maybe those are the guys watchingsmall animals have fights. According to the data, many older people goto YouTube for reasons of nostalgia, while younger viewers are more interested in learning.
Channels making more than one million dollarsper year have been increasing yearly by around 40 percent, so YouTube has become a game changerin terms of how people make money. The number of smaller channels that have turnedinto a job has also been steadily increasing. Because YouTube is still on this upwards trajectoryand more and more people are making brilliant channels, its value keeps increasing. Don’t expect Google to sell anytime soon,unless someone offers the company an insane amount of money. The standalone platform could be worth a whopping$300 billion for Google, or at least Google’s parent company, Alphabet. TikTok is certainly no flash in the pan, andyou can expect it will become much more popular, but the YouTube universe is ever-expanding.
The kinds of content you will see on YouTubewill get even better, more educational, more exciting, funnier, more professional and moreentertaining. TikTok cannot compete with this, and we don’tthink it wants to. It’s its own rising star, there’s no doubtabout that, but there’s little chance it will outshine YouTube in the years to come.