Instagram dethroned TikTok because the app with essentially the most downloads in 2023 because the China-owned video app faces scrutiny from US regulators, with some lawmakers warning it poses a security threat.
Instagram’s total variety of app downloads grew 20% year-over-year in 2023, to 768 million, in response to data from Sensor Tower.
The statistics mean that the Meta-made photo-sharing app is essentially the most downloaded on this planet, per the market intelligence firm’s findings, which were earlier reported on by the Financial Times.
Downloads of TikTok, meanwhile, increased by a mere 4%, to 733 million, in the identical period.
“Instagram has outperformed TikTok in adoption over the past few years, driven by the recognition of its reels feature together with legacy social media features and functions,” Abraham Yousef, senior insights manager at Sensor Tower, told the outlet.
Chinese tech behemoth ByteDance launched TikTok in 2016. In 2018 — after its $800 million merger with Shanghai-based lip-sync social media site Musical.ly — it became essentially the most downloaded within the US.
Inside the first six months of 2018, TikTok was downloaded greater than 104 million times in Apple’s App Store alone, in response to Sensor Tower.
By the point COVID was plaguing the nation in 2020, TikTok’s popularity exploded.
That very same yr, Instagram debuted “reels” — a feature that enables users to share short clips — in a move that attempted to clone TikTok’s approach in hooking hundreds of thousands of Gen Z consumers, in response to FT.
TikTok’s edge over Instagram waned incrementally in 2021 and 2022, before losing its spot because the most-downloaded app last yr, when Instagram’s monthly energetic users reached 1.47 billion, in response to Senor Tower.
Instagram welcomed 13 million recent monthly energetic users — a measure of the efficiency of selling strategies, customer experience and consumer retention — within the last three months of 2023 alone.
In the identical period, TikTok saw 12 million users leave the platform, and ended 2023 with 1.12 billion monthly energetic users.
Despite having a smaller audience, TikTok users engage with the platform at the next rate than those on Instagram, in response to FT.
Users on TikTok spent a median of 95 minutes on the platform within the fourth quarter of 2023, compared with 62 minutes on Instagram, half-hour on X and 19 minutes on Snapchat — mostly due to TikTok’s unique ability to feed users with content that targets their preferences, FT reported.
TikTok’s algorithm implies that anyone has the chance to go viral — and fast — thus attracting content creators seeking to achieve overnight success with the app’s Creator Fund, which awards eligible creators as much as 40 cents for each 1,000 views.
Which means that a creator a part of the payment program whose video gets 1 million views is in for a $400,000 windfall.
Instagram, meanwhile, doesn’t pay creators through an organization fund, and as a substitute provides creators with the chance to post brand partnerships and sponsored posts at a rate of their selecting, which is normally determined by their followers and engagement rate.
As recently as Monday, nevertheless, former President Donald Trump wanred that Chinese-owned TikTok is a national security threat, citing the necessity to protect the American people’s privacy and data rights.
Trump spoke out because the House prepares to take up laws this week that will ban firms like Apple and Google from offering TikTok hosting within the US or making it available on their app stores unless parent company ByteDance divests itself inside 180 days.
President Joe Biden has said he would sign a bill to ban TikTok if it got here to his desk amid continued concerns in regards to the app’s use of information collected from US users.
Bipartisan laws that will force Chinese government-linked ByteDance to unload TikTok already cleared a House committee vote unanimously last week — with lawmakers defying an all-out pressure campaign by the app and disgruntled users to kill the bill.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by a 50-0 vote during a markup session.
Greater than 100 million Americans alone use TikTok, a lot of whom are younger than 30 years old, and reports of the Chinese government stealing data of the app’s users have raised concerns amongst lawmakers in Washington.
In response, TikTok has bashed the bill “an outright ban” and said it could “trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they depend on to grow and create jobs.”
Nevertheless, concerned users have pointed to the app’s odd demands — resembling its request for users to input their iPhone passwords to view content — as reason why TikTok could also be allegedly spying on its US-based users.