TikTok had already surpassed YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in “time spent” by American adults on each platform, and is now hot on the heels of Netflix, according to a study by Insider Intelligence released Thursday. All while in the United States, the government and Congress are considering banning the hugely popular app entirely.
The platform, which belongs to the Chinese group ByteDance, certainly won over the youngest first, but it has also been widely adopted by adults, especially during the pandemic, underlines the Insider Intelligence report.
45 minutes today, 58 in 2024
This year, “TikTok users between the ages of 25 and 54 – ‘millennials’ and ‘Gen Xers’ – will spend more than 45 minutes a day on the app, much more than the time spent by users in the same age group on other social networks”, indicates the cabinet.
By 2024, Insider Intelligence predicts that TikTok users 18 and older will spend more than 58 minutes per day on average on the app, just behind Netflix (62 minutes) and well ahead of YouTube (48.7 minutes).
Efforts by California social networks to emulate the short-form viral video service had mixed effects, the study found. On YouTube, the “Shorts” “didn’t shake things up.” The “Reels” of Meta (Facebook, Instagram) are having some success, but the time spent watching them cannibalizes the time dedicated to the other formats, the main feed and the “Stories”, which show more ads and therefore bring more money To the group. .
The report also mentions the “second screen” phenomenon: “Viewers are often on TikTok while Netflix is playing in the background. Advertisers considering buying advertising on Netflix should note that some viewers can be distracted to the point of to quit your broadcast show.”
A wave of app bans
These statistics show the importance that this application has taken on in the United States, since it has more than one hundred million users in this country. But his ByteDance membership worries many elected officials. They fear Beijing will use it to access sensitive data or manipulate public opinion.
TikTok has been denying this for years, but tensions between the two countries, and recently the downing of an alleged Chinese spy balloon, have raised calls to stand firm against China.
On Wednesday, a bill that could lead to an outright ban on the platform in the United States passed a key milestone in the US Congress. And on Monday, the White House ordered federal agencies to ensure their officials’ devices are off TikTok within 30 days, after its ban was signed into law in late December.
The Canadian government and the Danish parliament made a similar decision. In Europe, the main European institutions have also chosen to ban the application on the professional devices of their employees.
In France, the National Assembly already plans to warn deputies about the espionage risks posed by the presence of TikTok on a phone. As for the French Executive, the government spokesman, Olivier Véran, assured that no minister had the application on their office phones, “which, in any case, do not tolerate the installation of any application of the social network type,” he said he.
Source: BFM TV
