TikTok overtakes YouTube for average watch time in US and UK

Note that this is &quot;average time on app&quot;, which draws two potential pitfalls:<p>• Youtube is consumed A LOT on the website, including some people using the mobile website (not the app) to keep it playing in the background (duh). This only compares average time on app.<p>• It could also be totally skewed, if let&#x27;s say 100M people spend 2h&#x2F;day on average on Youtube, and 1k (a tiny amount) spend 2.5h&#x2F;day on average on Tiktok, that&#x27;d be already good enough to say &quot;average time per user spent on the apps is higher for TikTok&quot;.<p>I haven&#x27;t read the report, but wanted to point out these two warnings. As we say in Spanish, the easiest way to lie is with statistics. And of course any half-decent PR person will take any numbers and blow it up into a headline, so tread with caution.<p>(Absolutely not wanting to discount on Tiktok, which has been growing at an incredible rate, just wanted to say that the wording on how exactly they are &quot;winning&quot; sounded a bit contrieved).

Yea, the Youtube algorithm is the &quot;pick me girl&quot; of algorithms.<p>I watched one video by a creator I already follow about their solar panel installation and water-catcher garden irrigation.<p>What do I get in my recommendations? Dozens and dozens of videos from completely random channels about solar panel installation and gardening.<p>I very rarely find new creators on YouTube, who produce consistent high quality content. I follow a handful of channels and even from them I lookat 20-40% of their videos.<p>TikTok on the other hand I swore I&#x27;d never use. Then came Covid19 and lockdowns. I reached the end of HN, Reddit and Youtube, so I installed it.<p>The Algorthm is fucking amazing. Dunno how they do it, but 80-90% of stuff it shows me I end up watching (it is 10secs to 3 mins so the investment isn&#x27;t that huge =) ).<p>I&#x27;ve ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f&#x27;d up cars they get to service, to farrier and sheep shearing videos to a guy who does comedy about weird animal facts.<p>I&#x27;d never actually go search anything like that on purpose, but I actually kinda found out I enjoy looking at. It&#x27;s a good way to space out for 30 minutes and relax. Most TikTok videos get to the point before a stereotypical YouTuber has gone through their intro and sponsor segments :)

This is a hit for US cultural dominance and influence.<p>Americans and Brits, at least in average watch time, are now consuming media ultimately controlled by the Chinese government.<p>And the previous election was influenced by a foreign government using American social media networks to influence, not to mention influencing the president-elect directly.<p>Either America&#x27;s own social networks are used against them or social networks controlled by other countries are gaining dominance.<p>It seems nothing other than a decline in American influence in the world. And it comes from other countries outperforming the Americans.<p>Whether America reacts to this or ignores it through the arrogance of the current greatest will define American power in the world for generations.

A couple of years ago, I noticed the youtube recommendations that would get were a lot less interesting, though still relevant to me somehow. At some point I started seeing a lot more &quot;mainstream&quot; content, especially after media companies figured out that they needed to have a youtube presence in order to stay relevant.<p>So I wonder if the algorithm the switched to had something to do with them potentially losing attention from users.<p>I can&#x27;t speak to tik tok, never used it, never will.

Can someone explain to me what happened to Vine? I feel like it beat TikTok to the punch by ~8 years before it was bought and then unceremoniously killed by Twitter. Was that the first example of US innovation being suffocated by the big tech oligopoly?

Something as massive as YouTube can be beaten. This feels like the circle of life, considering every empire that rises eventually falls too. Though I am not saying TikTok is the doom for YouTube since geo politics will play a significant role its future. And there are other metrics by which TikTok hasn’t probably caught up with YouTube yet like the size of the user base, revenue etc.<p>What seems odd is how TikTok is managing this. YouTube is popular among all demographics, the diversity of content is mind bogglingly high whereas (I presume) TikTok is popular among the crowd who are either going to highschool or in college. Its primary purpose is entertainment, so how did it beat YouTube exactly?

TikTok seems emblematic of China&#x27;s overall approach compared to the West - shows up late to the party, but studies all those hard-won lessons to copy and later surpass the most successful Western products. The free market is great at finding the superior product, but it&#x27;s also messy and wasteful with all those failed attempts - why not just sit it out until a winner starts to emerge, then copy them? China seems to have perfected the art of the fast follower.

Note that this is watch time *per active user* lest anyone interprets the title as TikTok having more total active user-time.

Seems many here are not TikTok users (and some never will) but besides algo TikTok video editing with music and app UX has made people so easy to jump on uploading and recording video from a smartphone, and making this toxic culture of attention from the young audience on making TikTok videos (just look for the cringe reactions of people recording TikTok users making videos).

I feel like I&#x27;m going crazy. Hasn&#x27;t TikTok been proven malicious in it&#x27;s excessive user tracking and data theft? Why does everyone I know still use it? Outside of privacy concerns, doesn&#x27;t the blackbox algorithm make anyone worry? We&#x27;re building automated echochambers for an entire population. We&#x27;re giving a Chinese company the ability to control the content consumption, and therefore beliefs and knowledge, of entire countries. The ever growing popularity of tiktok is, to me, extremely concerning.

15 seconds is the attention span teachers are going to have to compete with and try to teach. YouTube wasn’t mindless and short enough.

I believe it. Nowadays, I watch perhaps 1-2 videos a day on Youtube. The addictive endless scrolling of content on Tiktok means I&#x27;m spending on average an hour a day.

TikTok has two advantages - first, an order more user data to refine it&#x27;s feed algorithm and second a format that lowers the bar for content creation which allows for super niche content to be viable. The combination enables a feed that resonates.

I can&#x27;t wait for Google to make their own knock-off, do it in 4 different ways, kill them all off, do it another 3 times at the same time, and then kill those off too.<p>In the meanwhile they&#x27;ll have permanently degraded some part of their core service offerings chasing this, maybe putting 10 second videos in place of every street view shot in google maps, or making search favor short video content or some nonsense.

<i>However, YouTube retains the top spot for overall time spent - not per user - as it has many more users overall.</i><p>Burying the lede here BBC...

It&#x27;s not a great metric by itself. There are two ways that &quot;average watch time&quot; can increase: users becoming more engaged, and less-engaged users dropping out of the app. It&#x27;s a concern if it means that TikTok is becoming a youth-only app, for example.

TikTok feels so incredibly fake. I know that a lot of that same fake content is available on YouTube, but on YouTube, I can subscribe to creators that do real things or offer substantial and interesting critiques. TikTok and Facebook video feel like broadcast TV - highly over-dramatized and over-hyped. Again, I know the same is available on YT, but I can also use it my way.

I wish the thing killing Google&#x27;s golden goose weren&#x27;t worse than Google.<p>TikTok does it by pairing Twitter-level burnout-causing engagement juicing with short videos with no option to turn off autoplay.

youtube is my main streaming platform, but i have come to understand the appeal of tiktok. most of the things that are inherent to the tiktok platform, i have to manually do while using youtube.<p>a couple of examples are manually ignoring click-baits, overly long videos and explanations, multiple parts videos (some are genuine, but most are bad-intentioned), creators and channels i don&#x27;t care about, etc.

People here always say, how TikTok algorithm is &quot;amazing&quot;; while every time I try it, I just see teenagers badly dancing.

Yeah, probably because I never watch YT on the app, usually casting via Chromecast to a projector.<p>YT now has their &quot;shorts&quot; as well that they&#x27;re desperately trying to push to fill the gap that TikTok (well actually Vine) has created. But their big mistake was only allowing people to watch shorts on mobile...

&quot;YouTube still leads TikTok in overall time spent...&quot;<p>What&#x27;s the longest length video that TikTok supports? (I don&#x27;t use it)

Wonder what comparisons are possible for YT as MySpace and TikTok as Facebook? Seems like history is playing itself out again.

The headline is a bit misleading<p>in the article: &quot;average time per user spent on the apps is higher for TikTok... However, YouTube retains the top spot for overall time spent - not per user - as it has many more users overall.&quot;<p>The average TikTok user spents more time, which is still interesting. Maybe kids just have more time on their hands.

Seems to be misunderstanding of TikTok and their algorithms. WSJ did an interesting experiment where they programmed a bot to do take interest in certain videos. the tldr is that it spirals till you get more concentrated, extreme in the type of content. i.e they searched for depressing videos and they get more and more depressing.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;tiktok-algorithm-video-investigation-11626877477?st=5bb3anuebdbthut&amp;reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;tiktok-algorithm-video-investig...</a><p>Where Facebook has a weakpoint is that the content they server you is rather limited. It&#x27;s a newsfeed of your friends, your friends friends (maybe) and the groups you&#x27;ve joined. Maybe they&#x27;ll recommend something for you. But most of the time, it&#x27;s stuff you&#x27;ve more or less opted into.<p>TikTok on the other hand - has at its disposal videos made by anyone, at anytime in the history of its app. That&#x27;s a lot of content. I can be on Facebook and be done scrolling in 15 minutes. Same with Instagram, Twitter. TikTok, because it has essentially an infinite amount of assets it can serve...you&#x27;re there forever, watching short snippets of videos to get a dopamine hit.<p>Not comparable to other social media, IMHO...more dangerous, regardless of which country owns it.

TikTok will surpass both Youtube&#x2F;Instagram in terms of videos watched, tiktok will also change the way we consume content and how we interact with it. They also came further in solving comments to videos unlike Youtube where comments section is a toxic wasteland.

Whelp this is not a trend TikTok really is just that addictive. I created an account and its a firehose.<p>I post short permaculture videos: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vm.tiktok.com&#x2F;ZMRfVWm76&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vm.tiktok.com&#x2F;ZMRfVWm76&#x2F;</a>

I can&#x27;t watch TikTok. It&#x27;s the most obnoxious media I&#x27;ve ever seen. Where is the pause or stop button!? The UX feels like a ride on a rail car without brakes that is run by a coked out conductor.

Overton window friendly mainstream content shaped by PRC censorship is popular because no one likes running across divisive &#x2F; distressing content that seems to be endgame of western attention merchant approach. Incidentally western platforms follow suit and starts cracking down on undesirables. Going to be interesting once TikTok rolls out massively profitable store fronts &#x2F; shopping layer comparable to DouYin. Maybe tiktok philosphy will prove that serenity sells more than drama. Censored, curated speech is more marketable to unrestricted free speech.

YouTube is going to blow it with the extremely hamfisted and enraging TikTok clone built into the YouTube app. Being unable to exit a video the same way one would exit a normal YT video is a nightmare, esp since you often won’t know it’s a “short” until it’s too late. There are other dealbreaker bugs in the shorts player. Hope they figure out another way and change course.

Well, who would have thought it would only take a short period of time until tt overtakes yt.

with all that data, they can map public areas and find the best to settle in, that media is influencing public opinion, they can prune messages they disagree with even more so than youtube has ever done.

It’s the new drug

Wow.. this is huge.

China’s rise continues.

Ultimately tiktok is enjoyable and I feel happy after closing it. Western apps by comparison are filled with the culture wars and I open them less and less often. Hn included.

I thought about starting my own TikTok page dedicated to programming so I recorded one about why I still prefer C++ over Rust. While I got decent views for the subject matter, I got roasted by 12-year-olds in the comments section. The top one implied the real reason I preferred C++ was because I’m a boomer, and it was apparently written by someone who likes to upload Roblox music videos. My page has since been made private.<p>I can take toxic Reddit, HN, and even Twitter comments, and while I found the whole situation hilarious there’s something frightening about opening my whole identity for hordes of anonymous people to judge. There’s a power imbalance that doesn’t seem to bother a subset of Gen Z or the general population who continue uploading content there.

This is intensely offensive. US tech companies are banned, robbed, and defrauded by China. We have no chance to compete with them in China, yet they can come here and freely. Tiktok should be banned.

Thanks to the gross incompetence of Susan Wojcicki and Google abandoning their old motto, &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot;.

Exactly what malware do people install to get on &quot;App Annie&quot; panel? Is it the &quot;Phone Guardian VPN: Safe Wifi&quot; garbage I see in the Play Store? People really will install anything. Perhaps the conclusion should be changed to &quot;Clueless dupes who install spyware also more likely to prefer TikTok&quot;.