Cyberculture/Social Media/TikTok

TIKTOK

Overview -

TikTok is an iOS and Android social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. The application allows users to create short music and lip-sync videos of 3 to 15 seconds and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. It was launched in September 2016 by ByteDance under the name of ‘Douyin’ for Chinese markets. In September 2017, it was relaunched under the name ‘TikTok’ to cater to demand in foreign markets. On 9th November 2017, ByteDance invested upto $1billion to acquire Music.ly, a Shanghai based start up with an office in Santa Monica, California.

Owing to it’s popularity as a social media platform that targets the US teenage market, the acquisition helped TikTok break into the west.

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