Enlarge image
TikTok logo on a smartphone
Photo: Adriana Adinandra / INA Photo Agency / imago images / INA Photo Agency
The network has a new number one - at least says an important Internet service provider.
According to calculations by Cloudflare, TikTok has pushed Google from the throne of the most popular internet domain.
According to a blog entry by the company, the short video platform received more data traffic in 2021 than Google's services including maps, photos and news - but without YouTube.
Cloudflare's Top 10 of 2021
1 TikTok 2 Google 3 Facebook 4 Microsoft 5 Apple 6 Amazon 7 Netflix 8 YouTube 9 Twitter 10 WhatsApp |
Last year, TikTok was still in seventh place, Google in first place.
In between there was an expected sequence of Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and Amazon.
A win of the day went to YouTube
On February 17, 2021, TikTok climbed the "top spot", writes Cloudflare now, initially for one day.
In the following months, however, according to Cloudflare, the offer repeatedly pushed itself in front of Google on a daily basis, in order to finally "take the lead on most days" from August onwards.
On one day, according to the data, YouTube also pushed itself past all its competitors - in eighth place in the overall ranking - on February 2.
While Cloudflare does not allow itself to interpret why TikTok overtook Google overall, the company is guessing how Google's video portal was able to secure this day's victory.
Accordingly, on the one hand, some of the lavishly produced advertising clips that were to be shown a few days later on the TV broadcast of the Super Bowl were published on that day.
On the other hand, it was the day of the military coup in Myanmar, which a fitness blogger inadvertently documented in her morning aerobics video on YouTube (read more here).
Where do the numbers come from?
Measured over the year, however, not only Google and YouTube TikTok have to admit defeat, but also - in relation to social networks - Facebook, which was also distributed by the video platform from its »Top Spot«. "That should mean that, from our point of view, TikTok has more Internet traffic," the Cloudflare authors comment on this result cautiously - and that's where it gets technical.
The ranking determined by Cloudflare is derived from measurements made by the company's public DNS resolver, it says. This means a server that translates the names of websites - such as spiegel.de - into IP addresses such as those used on the Internet to find these websites. Because it only measures the amount of data queries, it is not possible to deduce the number of users who triggered these queries. Facebook therefore remains the largest social network in terms of number of users - TikTok only causes more data traffic.
However, these explanations by Cloudflare also show a weakness of such top 10 lists.
Because the company doesn't really explain the data basis for it.
Cloudflare's glossary only states that the lists use aggregated data "that Cloudflare has about global Internet traffic patterns": "The most popular website or web application, based on our ranking methodology, is in first place."
In any case, the company ignores a substantial driver of global Internet data traffic in its investigations.
It writes: "Domains that are classified as pornography or content servers have been excluded from our ranking."
mak