According to mobile data analytics company App Annie, TikTok has overtaken YouTube in average watch time in the US. This data only reflects Android phones, and the company does not know how the apps compare on other platforms, but it does reflect TikTok’s incredible growth throughout the past couple years and its influence over today’s culture.
The overtaking actually happened first in August of last year in the US, with a couple months of back-and-forthing, finally to happen again in April of this year. As of June 2021, American TikTok users are watching 24 hours of content per month on average, while YouTube users are watching 22 hours and 40 minutes per month.
Also in that month, people in the UK were watching a whopping 25 hours of TikToks a month while only watching 15 hours on YouTube.
When it comes to overall time spent on the app, YouTube still reigns supreme, which makes sense as it has a user base of two billion people compared to TikTok’s 700 million. YouTube users spend time on the home page looking for videos to watch, while TikTok users let the algorithm decide automatically. The nature of content on these two platforms could also play a part in this, as TikTok holds mainly short-form videos with a three minute limit, while most YouTube videos are long form, with an average on 10 minutes per video.
The report also includes data on specific countries and statistics about their social app usage.
Out of all the countries displayed on the chart, Malaysia actually ranks the lowest based on social app downloads for H1 2021. Even if you look at the data from the past 10 years, Malaysia is not even on the chart for the majority of them. This is based on data from iOS and Google Play, although China’s numbers are lower as they only have iOS data and no Google Play data from there.
When it comes to social app consumer spending, Malaysia climbs up the ranks to #15, still near the bottom of the list. Comparing hours spent in social apps, Malaysia is at #21, beating out Peru, Spain, and Saudi Arabia. These numbers are not scaled per capita.
There is actually a lot more interesting data in the report, such as how much live-streaming sites like Twitch blew up during the pandemic, reaching a peak of 89,400,000 monthly smartphone users back in March of this year. If you want to read more, you can look through the report yourself at App Annie’s website.
