TikTok overtakes Google as the most popular site on the planet
David slays another Goliath.
TikTok has dethroned Google to become the world’s most popular website. The viral video app has finally ended Google’s dominance. According to cloud-services company Cloudflare, the social-media platform’s website has raced ahead of Google as the most popular web domain in the world.
The five-year-old app overtook internet Goliath Google Search along with the rest of Google’s digital properties (like Maps, Shopping, News, Images, Translate, etc.).
Last year, TikTok ranked seventh on Cloudflare’s web-traffic ranking—behind Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon. Owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance, it’s also the only non-American site to occupy a spot in Cloudflare’s top 10.
The top 10 sites in the world
- TikTok.com
- Google.com
- Facebook.com
- Microsoft.com
- Apple.com
- Amazon.com
- Netflix.com
- YouTube.com
- Twitter.com
- WhatsApp.com
Cloudflare notes this ranking is calculated using aggregated data it possesses on internet traffic patterns. This data includes stats on a domain’s popularity, the percentage change in web traffic, and the change in rank over the selected time frame. It doesn’t necessarily track with different data about a website’s total number of visitors or unique users in a month. For total users, Facebook still takes that cake.
TikTok new force is undeniable. 167 million TikTok videos get streamed each minute of every day. Their sheer number blows away all the other players. Google, which handles about 90% of all internet searches, conducts 5.7 million searches per minute. YouTube and Netflix users stream barely 1 million hours of content every 60 seconds, combined. But TikTok says it has 1 billion active users, almost half of whom are between the ages of 16 and 24.[1]
What does this mean for brands and PR in Nigeria
Public Relations agencies will have to become more social media savvy and catch up with the increasingly digital world. It calls for other challenges too:
- In the new world order, anything can happen, and no brand can assume that it will remain great forever. PR and Marketing strategists must challenge their clients to continuously improve and innovate.
- While the fundamentals of PR and communications will not change, PR professionals must be more open to change and keep a close watch on what the market is saying.
- Brands should also diversify their communications and be proactive in niche targeting. Google is gigantic for sure, but there is more to the internet than Google.
- Keep an eagle eye on the youth market. TikTok’s dizzying rise has been fuelled by the 16-24 age group. Nigeria has one of the youngest populations in the world, with over 100 million people below the age of 19. Future brand battles will be fought in this territory.[2]
