Zhi Ying, general manager of the marketing department of the company’s short video app Douyin, announced this afternoon on a festival held in Beijing that all of ByteDance’s apps combined, which include TikTok, Douyin, and Toutiao, now have more than 1.5 billion monthly active users (MAU) and more than 700 million daily active users.
Not too long ago, the firm had pegged its MAU at 1 billion – but ByteDance confirmed the new figure with KrAsia today. A spokesperson explained that the number shared in June by Zhang Nan, the president of short video app Douyin, referred to data from January. In other words, ByteDance says it gained 500 million users in the span of less than 6 months.
Douyin, the Chinese mainland version of TikTok, now has more than 320 million daily active users, according to Zhi.
The firm was valued at USD 75 billion after its latest financing round and is planning an initial public offering as early as this year, which was first reported by Wall Street Journal.
Unlike Tencent whose social apps WeChat and QQ are mostly popular among Chinese users, ByteDance has been successful beyond the Chinese territory, especially with its short video app TikTok.
WeChat’s monthly active users reached 1.1 billion by March 31, 2019, up 6.9% year-on-year while QQ had 823 million monthly active users, up 2.2% year-on-year.
TikTok has been downloaded 33 million times on Apple’s App Store in the first quarter of 2019, making it surpass YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook’s Messenger to be the most downloaded app on the App Store for the fifth consecutive quarter, KrAsia reported in May, citing data of consultancy firm Sensor Tower. In the same period, TikTok secured the third spot on Google Play.
Other apps from ByteDance’s portfolio are Helo, which is a popular social app in India, and Babe, a news aggregator in Indonesia.
Facebook, however, is still the world’s most popular social network by a long shot. It had almost 2.4 billion MAU as of the first quarter of 2019, and that’s just counting its main social network.
