TikTok has finally gone and taken Google off its almighty throne.
It has surpassed Google as the most-visited website of the year, remaining the most popular domain globally even on prominent days like Black Friday, as reported.
TikTok which was only ranked 7th or 8th on the list earlier, nabbed the top rank this year.
TikTok Taking Over the World
TikTok is a short video-sharing platform, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The reports say that TikTok received more internet traffic than Google search engine’s services like maps, translate, and drive services in 2021.
TikTok was launched back in 2016 where it gained attraction from all over the world with its viral dance and lip-syncing videos. But slowly the platform evolved and newer content like makeup, sports, cooking, drawing, and truckload of other categories started surfacing as short videos on the platform.
Its parent company, China-based ByteDance, was the only non-US site to feature in the top 10.
How Was the Estimate Done?
The report and analysis were done by web performance and security company Cloudflare’s internet traffic rankings.
Cloudflare said that it tracks the data using its tool “Cloudflare Radar”, which was launched by the company in September 2020.
This basically means the data for last year’s analysis only encompassed months from September to December, whereas the data for 2021 encompasses the whole year.
However, Cloudflare’s press release did not specify if TikTok’s traffic included that of Douyin, its sister app in China.
How Did TikTok Achieve This Feat?
Despite being banned in India, which was once its top global market, TikTok still jumped to the top spot overtaking the big shots like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon. Which is a brilliant feat indeed!
While platforms like Instagram and Twitter focus on elevating the followers of existing celebrities, TikTok on the other hand has its most-followed creators built up from the unknown. The most popular creators of TikTok were previously unknowns who got the stage provided by TikTok and garnered a lot of attention.
A prime example of some of those creators is American dancer Charli D’Amelio, Italian comedian Khaby Lame, and Philippino singer Bella Poarch.
Top 10 most popular websites of 2021
Here is the list of the 10 most popular domains in 2021 as recorded by the report:
- TikTok.com
- Google.com
- Facebook.com
- Microsoft.com
- Apple.com
- Amazon.com
- Netflix.com
- YouTube.com
- Twitter.com
- WhatsApp.com
Cloudflare said that one of the major reasons the internet traffic continued to grow was the Covid-19 Pandemic where people had to spend more time at their houses.
TikTok continues to dominate the headlines as a subject of cultural fascination, trends, memes, and music.
