How Fast is TikTok Growing?

It was recently reported that 8 new users join TikTok every second, with an average of 650,000 new users joining on a daily basis. Whilst it took Facebook and Instagram almost a decade to get a user base the size TikTok currently boasts, the platform was reported to have landed its billionth user in 2021; just four years after its global launch.

What started as a platform hosting an abundance of dance challenges and lip-syncing videos has grown astronomically, quickly taking sectors worldwide by storm. Despite only launching in 2017, TikTok was the seventh-most downloaded app of the 2010s.

In fact, undeterred by efforts to ban the platform in the United States in 2020, TikTok is the first app outside of Facebook to reach the milestone of 3 billion downloads and a devoted user base, in a fraction of the time.

With this in mind, we used the predicted statistic of 8 new users every second and compared this to population data for countries and continents worldwide by subtracting annual deaths from births to give a total predicted year-on-year growth figure, ​​to provide some extra context on just how significant the reach and influence of the app is now, and what could become of it in the future.

Launching in 2017 TikTok will have, of course, begun its journey with 0 users. In comparison to the world’s population of 7,878,112,344 during the same year, it seems sensible to presume that the growth of TikTok could never catch up with the world’s total population. However, as of 2018, TikTok had already amassed a total of 271,188,301 users – surpassing the total populations of Spain, Italy, France and the entirety of the UK combined in its first full year.

As of 2019, TikTok users had almost doubled to 507,552,660. Meanwhile, the world’s population increased at a slower rate with a growth of just over 1% on the previous year.

It was reported that TikTok celebrated a milestone of 1,000,000,000 users in 2021. As of this year, the platform had more users than the total population of Japan, the Philippines, Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey, Canada, Germany, Thailand, Spain, Italy, France and the UK combined (977,106,058) after just 4 years in circulation.

Looking to the future, as of 2025 TikTok’s growth is predicted to reach 2,597,664,000 daily users. In comparison to the valuated 339,893,949 population of the United States as of 2025, the total number of users on the social media platform is set to surpass 8x the population of the US in just three years’ time.

The worldwide population in 2035 is approximated at 9,208,674,347. Shockingly, in the same year, total TikTok users could reach 5,334,816,000. With the population of Asia predicted to reach 5,279,827,286; TikTok’s growth could surpass the population of the most densely populated continent in the world. In fact, if you took the total predicted population of the USA in 2035, you would still need to multiply the total 15x to reach the predicted number of TikTok users in that year.

To really see how TikTok’s growth has the potential to progress in years to come, we took our study even further into the future and analysed every year from 2017 – 2050. In 28 years’ time, the world’s population is predicted to reach the 10 billion mark. More specifically, 10,047,476,161 people on the planet. However, the astonishing thing? If the social media platform continues to grow at the speed it has over recent years, TikTok’s growth may not be far behind. The platform is predicted to reach an incredible 9,067,296,000 total users by 2050. To put this into context, that is equivalent to just over 90% of the entire world’s predicted population.

It’s safe to say that no platform has ever grown at the same speed as TikTok. Successfully dominating itself as a cultural force within society within the first few years of its inception and providing marketing opportunities to sectors across the globe, alongside entertaining people from all walks of life and generations, the app is cementing itself in both the present and the future at record speed.

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Methodology:

TikTok data was based on a recent prediction of 8 new users per second. Country data is sourced from ourworldindata.com with annual deaths subtracted from births to give total growth.