Everything You Should Know About TikTok India

TikTok is the most popular online app for short videos. The mission of the TikTok community is to enrich and inspire people by giving them a chance to express their experience and journeys in exciting ways creatively.

Over the years, TikTok has become a choice platform for hundreds of millions of Indian users to let the world see their potential.

Licensing and Creation

TikTok is a globally acclaimed company that has offices in 125 cities worldwide. In India, it was owned and managed by TikTok Pte Singapore, a subsidiary of ByteDance, and supported by global institutional investors like NewEnterprise Associates, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Coatue, Softbank, Sequoia, KKR, and GeneralAtlantic.

Overview of TikTok India

TikTok is owned by ByteDance Limited – a company that operates a variety of content platforms that entertain, educate, inspire, and inform people across geographies, cultures, and languages. TikTok has more than 6000 employees around the world.

There are several TikTok offices in many cities of India, such as Bangalore, Delhi, and Mumbai, with more than a thousand employees. The Indian TikTok team consists of local employees that work in important business functions, including Communications, Content Moderation, Partnerships and Alliances, Trust and Safety, Public Policy, Finance, Legal, User Growth, Sales, Marketing, and Operations. The team that moderates TikTok content in India manages about 15 major languages in the country, including Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi.

• Data Practices: the data of TikTok users are saved in data centers in Singapore and the United States, and there is strict control on how employees gain access to the data. Contrary to general rumors, TikTok does not provide any user data to the Chinese government and is not planning to do that even in the future.

• Safety and Trust: TikTok India has made a lot of effort to improve its Trust & Safety. The T&S is a sophisticated content moderation system that merges a sophisticated machine learning algorithm with the effort of a team that manages human content, which helps tone down content for fifteen major languages in India.

TikTok India Features and Key Highlights

• In the fourth month of 2019, the parent company of TikTok – ByteDance – announced a whooping one billion dollar investment in India for the next 36 months.
• EduTok Program, an integrated educational concept, incorporates the wider goal of democratizing education for the TikTok India community.

• Edutalk Campus: Tiktok used this program to merge with top institutions like Kelkar (V.G. Vaze college), NM College of Commerce and Economics, and India Institute of Technology – Mumbai to encourage the student community to develop their talent by creating and sharing content on the platform that would educate.

TikTok India Ban

In June 2021, India’s ministry of electronics and information technology made it publicly known that TikTok – including 58 other Chinese apps – is considered illegal in India. At the outset of the ban, the government of India gave the banned apps a chance to explain their compliance with the privacy and security requirements of the country. Unfortunately for TikTok and the other banned apps, the government was not satisfied with the explanation given by the restricted apps, so the ban remains permanent. Furthermore, the ban was based on the claim that TikTok contains some indecent content that offend Muslim viewers’ sensitivity. Also, there is the fear that TikTok data could be shared with the Chinese government – a process known as ‘data mining, even though TikTok has denied this.

TikTok Statistics

The knowledge of TikTok statistics can be useful for marketers worldwide. These statistics might teach a user how to reach a wider audience on the platform.

• Number of Users: Since the past six years of its launch, TikTok has gained massive popularity. As of January 2021, TikTok has garnered about 690 million active users, making the platform the seventh-largest and ahead of the ones that have been around for much longer, including Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
• Number of Downloads: TikTok attained its first billion downloads in February 2019 and gained another 500 million in October of the same year. Now over the years, TikTok has had over two billion downloads all over the world.
• Google Play Downloads: In Brazil alone, TikTok was downloaded 3.08 million times on Google Play Store in September 2020. Brazil was the country with the most number of TikTok downloads, then followed by Mexico with 3 million downloads. The United States came third with 2.31 million downloads.

• Average Number of Time Users Spend on TikTok Daily: Users consume an average of 55 minutes on TikTok each day. This indicates that users either share their videos on the app or watch other people’s content. As a result, both TikTok and Instagram gain about the same amount of time from their users.

Conclusion

It is safe to assume that TikTok is becoming more successful than other similar social media apps. However, even though TikTok seems to be competing with the powerful players in the same social sphere, the platform provides a different purpose than Snapchat, Instagram, or YouTube. TikTok’s main aim is content creation, allowing users to showcase and express themselves.