TikTok’s global social media takeover is starting to slow down
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
TikTok, the explosively popular Chinese social media platform, may be approaching the upper limits of its global popularity. The platform launched in 2016 as a lip-syncing app called Musical.ly before being acquired by ByteDance, now the world’s most valuable startup. Following an international launch in 2017 and an official rebranding, TikTok has since expanded into a unique hybrid somewhere between Vine and YouTube that’s captured the cultural zeitgeist among teenage smartphone owners in unprecedented fashion.
In the two and a half years since it launched outside China, TikTok has seen astounding growth, adding more than 500 million users so far this year and closing in on 1.5 billion users in total. But according to new data from…
