[Short-form Golden Age]② TikTok Threatening Google 'Now as a Search and Consumption Service'

Last Year TikTok Revenue Estimated at $10 Billion (Approx. 12.5 Trillion KRW)
World's No.1 in Visitors, Expanding Service from Videos to Search Space

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Heeyoon] Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg identified TikTok as the most powerful and effective competitor in an interview last October. He emphasized that the era of one-way content consumption is over and highlighted the importance of interaction with TikTok's AI-driven feed. TikTok, a platform representing short-form videos around 15 seconds, is now threatening YouTube's dominance.

Global app market analysis site data.ai announced that in the first quarter of last year, TikTok's average monthly usage time per user (excluding China) was 23.6 hours, surpassing YouTube's 23.2 hours and Facebook's 19.4 hours during the same period. In response to TikTok's rapid growth, YouTube immediately launched Shorts, a similar service, and Instagram introduced Reels to catch up.

U.S. market research firm Business Insider Intelligence estimated that TikTok's revenue last year rose 100% year-over-year to reach $10 billion (approximately 12.42 trillion KRW). This amount exceeds the combined revenues of Twitter and Snapchat, proving the strong performance of the latecomer TikTok.

Seo Wonjeong, known as TikTok creator Wonjeongman, who ranks second in TikTok followers domestically and first among general users, cited TikTok's advantages as “easy video shooting and editing, a wide variety of music tracks available, and an attractive structure where videos by ordinary people, not celebrities, can achieve explosive view counts.” The fast sharing speed and convenient production environment have been the background for TikTok quickly absorbing content that evolves from internet trends into memes. TikTok challenge events before album releases have become essential, not optional, for corporate promotions and idols including singers.

Image from the global travel campaign conducted by TikTok. [Photo by TikTok]

Having become a familiar platform for the MZ generation, TikTok is gradually expanding as a space for acquiring information. In July last year, Google’s Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan announced at a conference that “40% of Generation Z in the U.S. use TikTok and Instagram rather than Google when searching for lunch spots,” based on internal research. As the use of search functions for user convenience increased on video platforms, TikTok quickly responded. Since last year, TikTok has started providing descriptions and comment-linked keywords for videos and is already testing commerce integration features combining location tags with nearby restaurants, shops, and hotels through its Chinese version, Douyin. This is a case where a user group familiar with videos has raised the service standard.

Last year, TikTok extended the maximum video upload time from the previous 3 minutes to 10 minutes. This is an attempt to expand beyond short-form to content requiring slightly longer durations. This is expected to intensify the direct competition with YouTube. Experts view TikTok’s moves, including the launch of its self-developed augmented reality platform ‘Effect House,’ as a preemptive strategy targeting the Meta-commerce consumers of Generation Z who enjoy both experiencing and consuming content. They also predict that the competition between the two global video platform giants will continue alongside national-level confrontations.