This week we got together with the team to decide what this week’s newsletter would be about, until someone said TikTok turned 10 in September (the original Chinese version, Douyin, to be fair).
Ten years... crazy, huh?
So we’ve put together 10 facts and figures about TikTok to mark the first ten years of a social network that changed how every other platform works. It was the first to build a main feed out of accounts you don’t follow, picked by what you watch instead of who you’ve added.
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1. ByteDance launched Douyin in China on September 20, 2016, under the working name A.me. It wouldn't launch TikTok outside Asia until a year later.
2. In November 2017, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, took over its user base, and merged it with TikTok in August 2018.
3. In April 2020, when the world came to a stop, TikTok became a refuge for a lot of people. It passed 2 billion downloads, less than four years after launching outside Asia. Chances are you found it then, too.
4. As of today, 2 billion people use TikTok every month, behind Instagram’s 3 billion.
5. The United States leads the list with the most users by country, 170 million, followed by Indonesia with 108 million.
7. The most-liked video on TikTok belongs to Australian influencer Leah Halton, set to 'Praise Jah in the Moonlight - YG Marley'. It has passed 80 million likes and 1.3 billion views.
@looooooooch Summer😊#Inverted
8. Khaby Lame is the most-followed account on TikTok, with more than 160 million followers.
@khaby.lame Ig:@khaby00
9. Even with Reels and Shorts as competition, TikTok is still the best platform to grow on if you're running a small account. According to our TikTok Study, 44% of accounts with under 100K followers grew between 2025 and 2026.
10. People spend more than 90 minutes a day on TikTok, on average. Instagram, by comparison, sits at 32 minutes.
11. Bonus: TikTok has its own school now (at least one), and more than 10,000 students have already taken Metricool's Free TikTok Course, where they learn to build a strategy for their account.
That’s ten years in ten facts. If you want the whole story, from day one to today and every feature they’ve rolled out along the way, it’s in this post:
THIS WEEK’S STORIES
🛒 TikTok rolls out new features to improve the shopping experience on the platform, powered by AI, making it easier to search for products, get answers to questions inside the app, and buy directly.
🔙 Instagram is testing an option that lets users open straight into Reels instead of the traditional feed.
📲 YouTube rolls out an update to its Shorts algorithm to give more weight to original content.
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📆 October 14, 2026, 12:00 pm BST (7:00 am EDT, 4:00 am PDT, 10:00 pm AEDT)
Margaret and our host Maddie are both in the UK, which is why the clock looks like that. If you’re reading this from the US or Australia, there’s a good chance you’ll be in your pajamas when it starts. We won’t wake you up for it. Sign up anyway and the recording lands in your inbox with all the resources the moment it’s over.
PS
I love looking back at the journey the big social networks have been on.
And putting this one about TikTok together was a blast. What do you remember most about TikTok? For me, no question, it's my first trend, the day I downloaded the app during COVID-19. I realized I wasn't any good at it, and that same day my career as a 'tiktoker' both started and ended.
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