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TikTok is especially popular with children and teenagers
Photo: Kiichiro Sato / AP
Only four years after the start of TikTok by the Chinese parent company ByteDance, the video platform has exceeded the threshold of one billion monthly active users.
TikTok announced on Monday.
The platform last provided information on active users in July 2020.
Since then, according to the new figures, more than 300 million have been added.
TikTok is especially popular with children and teenagers.
Apparently also due to the restrictions during the corona pandemic such as school closings, the number of users rose again significantly.
Last year, TikTok was the most downloaded app.
Originally TikTok only offered 15-second videos, later the maximum length was extended to 60 seconds and finally to three minutes in early July.
The aim was to attract a larger audience.
There were also rivalries with Instagram, which introduced a direct competitor Reels a year ago, and with YouTube.
According to its own information, Google's video service has around 2.3 billion active users.
TikTok underpins its position as the only online platform with global reach that does not come from the USA.
Last year, then US President Donald Trump tried to force a sale of TikTok's international business to American investors.
Trump pointed to risks for data from US users and threatened to ban the app in the US.
But the government in Beijing torpedoed the deal by halting sales of software algorithms.
In addition, the threat of a ban in the USA was defused by a court.
Today's TikTok is ultimately a mixture of two apps: ByteDance bought the lipsync service Musical.ly in 2017 and merged it with TikTok.
Musical.ly already had 200 million users.
pbe / AFP / dpa