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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Technology
Mark Sweney

The rise of TikTok: why Facebook is worried about the booming social app

TikTok Facebook Instagram Meta ByteDance Snapchat Twitter Inc. Donald Trump Mark Zuckerberg Huawei
A man looking at his phone walks past a restaurant in Beijing displaying a TikTok logo
A man looking at his phone walks past a restaurant in Beijing displaying a TikTok logo. Photograph: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

TikTok is on track to overtake the global advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined this year, and to match mighty YouTube within two years, as trendsetting teens and young adults make it the hottest social app of the moment – and Facebook is worried.

The Chinese-owned video-sharing platform is forecast to catch up with YouTube by 2024 when both are predicted to take $23.6bn (£18.2bn) in ad revenue, despite TikTok being launched globally 12 years after its Google-owned rival.

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