Google might still be the MOST VISITED website of all time, afterall, it’s kind of hard not to be if you also happen to be the world’s most popular and most widely-used search engine, but in terms of website popularity, TikTok has now surpassed Google, according to the latest data by Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a web security and performance monitoring company, so it’s safe to say that datasets from them are fairly legitimate.
The Over-Underdog
Just last year, TikTok, though was gaining popularity, only ranked #7 or #8 on Cloudflare’s list, which is why it’s all the more victorious to see it climb to the #1 spot and grab the crown this year. Although not surprising, since everyone by now probably saw it coming, what with TikTok’s crazy momentum and all, it’s still an achievement worth lauding.
The company states that it tracks data using its tool called the ‘Cloudflare Radar’. The radar was launched back in September of 2020, meaning that the data from last year is majorly skewed, given that the tool would’ve only been able to account the time from September to December, where 2021 made it cover an entire year, all would-be 365 days of it.
As Clouflare noted in its ‘Year-in Review Blog Post’:
“It was on February 17, 2021, that TikTok got the top spot for a day. Back in March, TikTok got a few more days and also in May, but it was after August 10, 2021, that TikTok took the lead on most days. There were some days when Google was #1, but October and November were mostly TikTok’s days, including on Thanksgiving (November 25) and Black Friday (November 26).”
It could be that during the aforementioned months, TikTok simply offered more utility and functionality than Google, encouraging more optimal take-up of its platform. Likewise, it’s also easier to monetize yourself on TikTok without having to heavily rely on ads, since its format allows even your 15-second clips to get millions of views if you time and theme it right.
Behind Google this year are Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, and Twitter. Besides overtaking Google, and much to its competitor’s dismay, TikTok also kicked Facebook off the throne as ‘Most Popular Social Media Website’, at least according to Cloudflare’s list.
The Wrap
There’s but 1 thing we can glean from this, and it’s that TikTok is one powerful player. It overtook, in a year, two of the longest and most established names in the online industry. Though it doesn’t really mean much for Google, the blow is yet another crippling move for Facebook, especially that it’s currently poised to win back younger users.
To close, we take this snippet for Cloudflare’s report:
“In what was the second year of the pandemic, social media domains continued high on our ranking. The nine main social media applications were all in our top 100 list of most popular global domains … We can see that TikTok … took Facebook from its crown of the most popular social media website-domain in our ranking.”
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Sources