TikTok overtakes YouTube in average US watch time

App users in both the United States and United Kingdom are spending more time on TikTok than YouTube, indicating increased engagement for the short-form video-sharing social media platform, according to a new report.

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“The Evolution of Social Media,” published Monday by app monitoring firm App Annie, characterized TikTok’s influence as having “upended the streaming and social landscape,” CNN reported.

According to the report, TikTok’s average time per user surpassed that of YouTube in the UK in June 2020 and the U.S. in April. The app has also ranked as the world’s most downloaded since 2020, the network reported.

Meanwhile, video and live-streaming platforms have commanded “increasingly large shares of time and money spent in social apps and have risen dramatically in the past four years,” Forbes reported, noting that live-streaming apps such as Twitch and Bigo Live are expected to amass a collective 548 billion hours in 2021.

The “time spent” metric cited in App Annie’s report accounts for Android phones only, however, and YouTube retains the top spot for overall time spent based primarily on its behemoth reach.

According to BBC News, Google-owned YouTube boasts an estimated two billion monthly users, while TikTok’s most recent public figures indicated it had about 700 million in mid-2020.

Overall, social media apps have been downloaded some 74 billion times globally in the past decade, including roughly 4.7 billion downloads in the first half of 2021 alone, Forbes reported.

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