According to a technology firm that measures online activity, TikTok has beaten Facebook and Google as the most popular internet destination for the first time.
TikTok was the most visited website and most frequently used social media network, according to storage software provider Cloudflare’s monitoring of web traffic this year. The rating by Cloudflare is based on how much web traffic a site received in 2021.
TikTok was established in 2016 by the Chinese firm ByteDance. After buying competitor app Musical.ly a year later, the site gained traction in the United States in 2020, with viral videos including one featuring Idaho resident Nathan Apodaca skating and sipping Ocean Spray cranberry juice while listening to Fleetwood Mac.
Yet while TikTok steadily grew, the platform never rose higher than No. 7 in web traffic, according to Cloudflare. That changed in 2021.
“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,” Cloudflare’s João Tomé and Sofia Cardita wrote in the blog post.
After TikTok, the top 10 most visited social media platforms this year were:
- YouTube
- Snapchat
- Quora
