Roehl Niño Bautista · · 2 min readTikTok ousts Google as world’s most popular domain in 2021
There’s a new top domain worldwide as snackable-video platform TikTok danced its way ahead of Google and Facebook in 2021, according to a report by US security firm Cloudflare.
Photo credit: Savconstantine/123RF.com
Owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, Tiktok became a pandemic hit as users stuck at home found themselves dancing during the lockdown. It ranked seventh on Cloudflare’s 2020 list. This year, the platform rose to no. 1 while Google and Facebook slid down to second and third place, respectively. The top ten list is as follows:
- TikTok.com
- Google.com
- Facebook.com
- Microsoft.com
- Apple.com
- Amazon.com
- Netflix.com
- YouTube.com
- Twitter.com
- WhatsApp.com
However, the report stressed that this ranking does not necessarily reflect the number of users on the platforms. The list is derived from Cloudflare’s public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1, “so it’s not related to the number of unique users or visitors it gets per month,” the company explained.
“TikTok got more internet traffic from our standpoint,” the report noted. “Facebook is, by far, the platform with more users worldwide.”
In a separate study, TikTok was the fifth top app in terms of lifetime consumer spends.
This development comes as the Chinese app has become a venue for misinformation worldwide, from election-related propaganda in the US to Covid-19 myths in Asia. In the Philippines, TikTok and YouTube are being urged to act on fake news proliferating on their platforms ahead of the presidential elections next year.
TikTok was also flagged as a national security risk in the US during the Trump administration. It has been banned in India, along with other Chinese apps.
Editing by Collin Furtado
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