BEIJING, September 27 (TMTPOST)— Chinese tech giant ByteDance achieves a milestone in overseas expansion in the short video industry. TikTok’ global community is now more than 1 billion people strong, which means the short video platform has more than 1 billion people from around the world every month watching and sharing each other’s creativity, the chief operating officer Vanessa Pappas announced in a video released on Monday.  

The latest users figure suggests monthly users of the ByteDance's video-based social app increased 45% since its monthly active users (MAU) just hit 689 million in July, 2020, underscoring how the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the rise of video consumption as the app’s users nearly doubled since the end of 2019 despite a ban in its biggest market India and the threat of a similar fate in its third largest market the U.S. in 2020.

The figure also forms a sharp contrast to poor overseas performance of TikTok’s Chinese rival Kuaishou recent years, particularly in North America. In the first half of 2021, TikTok was the most downloaded non-game app in the world with almost 383 million new downloads while users just first downloaded Kuaishou’s Zynn 400,000, according to the mobile app market researcher Sensor Tower. TikTok is the first app to hit 3 billion downloads outside Facebook’s domain as well as the fifth non-game app achieved such milestone since January 2014, next to WhatsApp, Messager, Facebook and Instagram.

Zynn emerged as a star to take the lead of the app store download charts within 20 days of its launch in May, 2020 for cash rewards for signups and referring friends, however it soon fell off the map when such rewards halt after it was removed from Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store a month later, accusing of plagiarism. Last month, Kuaishou terminated services of Zynn, ending the TikTok clone in North American markets just running 15 months.