This was first published January 14, in our weekly newsletter Apptopia Insight. To receive insights like this weekly, sign up here.
- TikTok users spend 107 minutes per day on the app
- Users are showing signs of switching away from TikTok since September
- During this switch, Facebook and Snapchat benefitted the most, while Instagram and YouTube also gained
The TikTok ban is looking more and more likely to happen. What also is of interest is that a sale seems difficult to manage at this point, based on comments made last week at the hearing. Might TikTok actually disappear from the US for a while?
We wrote about potential implications back on 12/11 and thought we would follow up on a trend that was beginning to appear back then – there has been a change since September. However, we first must admire TikTok for how well it engages users. It is still growing time spent per day in the US in the mid-to-upper single digits. Time spent per day is averaging 107 minutes so far in January:
Signs of switching since September
What our previous blog post did not acknowledge is that there has been a change in cross-app usage behavior since September. We noticed that social media app users who also use TikTok are increasing their time spent on other social media apps faster than they are on TikTok. On average, social media users who also use TikTok have increased their time spent on other social apps by 12%, while their time spent on TikTok has increased by 8%:
From a cross-app usage standpoint (% of users of one app who also use the other), you can see that users of other social media apps are slowly starting to use TikTok less (-3%), while TikTok users are, on average, using other social media apps at the same rate:
Facebook and Snapchat benefitted the most; Instagram and YouTube also benefit
While it will shock no one that other social media apps stand to benefit from a TikTok ban, the takeaways from the above tables show some sense of what has been happening already instead of trying to predict the future. Facebook appears to be winning on both fronts. Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube are winning on the time spent front, but Snapchat much moreso. To summarize:
YouTube is seeing its users increase time spent on its app faster than on TikTok (12% vs 6%)
- Facebook is seeing its users increase time spent on its app faster than on TikTok (10% vs 8%) and has seen a greater percentage of TikTok users start using Facebook (77% to 80%)
- Snapchat is seeing its users increase time spent on its app faster than on TikTok (22% vs 9%)
- Instagram is seeing its users increase time spent on its app faster than on TikTok (14% vs 7%)
