Insights
TikTok Sets a Record and the RedNote Craze Subsides
Not only did TikTok not get banned in the US over the weekend, but it had its best day of the past year for app user engagement and tiktok.com web traffic on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Americans who thought banning TikTok on national security grounds was ridiculous had begun flocking to RedNote (xiaohongshu.com), another Chinese app. That’s despite the fact that the user interface is in Mandarin, and the ownership is even more tightly linked to the Chinese government.
Surge for RedNote
While users may have joined RedNoteas a mass action joke or protest, the result was the app went from having a few hundred thousand users in the US a few weeks prior to having 32.5 million on Sunday, January 19, the day the TikTok ban was supposed to go into effect. By Monday, with the threat of a ban apparently past, that active user count had dropped 54% to 14.9 million.
Although RedNote hadn’t previously marketed itself aggressively to Americans, its Google Play app listing now promises a chance to overcome language barriers and “make international friends,” suggesting it would like to hold onto its new American users if possible.
TikTok’s big day
Meanwhile, the TikTok app attracted nearly 107 million daily active users in the US on Sunday, iOS and Android combined. That was more than any day in the past year. On New Year’s Eve, TikTok got 68.7 million daily users in the US.
TikTok’s Sunday web traffic was also the highest of the past year, 18.6 million visits, as opposed to a 2024 average of about 10 million visits per day.
Presumably, those app users and website visitors who flocked to TikTok on Sunday were curious to see if the service really would go offline – as it did for about 14 hours on Sunday – or curious to see whether it was back online. The disruption was related to a law passed by Congress and signed by former President Joe Biden seeking to force the social media service to either sell itself to an American owner or shut down operations. TikTok’s outage has been criticized as a stunt – the Biden administration had said it would not pursue enforcement action because of the timing – but, if so, it was a successful stunt for engaging the TikTok user base.
With the crisis past, engagement with TikTok dropped back to a more typical level on Monday. Here’s what that looked like in web traffic.
Because of an issue related to the disruption of TikTok’s Apple App Store listing, we don’t complete app estimates for Monday, but on Android the pattern looked similar to the chart for the web.
Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump is seeking a deal with TikTok to allow it to continue operating in the US, despite the law that specifically targeted the company. Meanwhile, it seems much less likely that a TikTok ban will happen.
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