100 Products That Changed the World · #14: Douyin / TikTok
In July 2026, time spent per user on Douyin passed WeChat for the first time.
According to figures reported by IT Home in September, Douyin users spent 112 to 120 minutes a day in the app that month, against 82 to 85 minutes for WeChat users. WeChat still had more daily users, about 931 million to Douyin’s 714 million. But Douyin’s daily users grew 19% year on year, WeChat’s 3%.
A messaging app was overtaken on time spent by an app for watching videos.
Douyin and its overseas sibling TikTok are run separately and do not share content, but they run on the same product logic, so the ranking counts them as one product.
2016: a 15-second music video app
On September 26, 2016, ByteDance launched an app called A.me. On December 22 that year it was renamed Douyin.
At the start it did one narrow thing: pick a piece of music and shoot a 15-second vertical video.
Short video was not its invention. In China there were already Kuaishou and Meipai; overseas there were Vine and Musical.ly. Douyin’s early format looked a lot like Musical.ly’s lip-sync music clips.
Two product choices it made were later copied by almost every short video app:
- Full screen, vertical, one video at a time. One video fills the screen, plays automatically, and a swipe up brings the next one
- The home screen is the recommendation feed. By default you do not land on “people you follow” but on what the system picks for you
No need to follow anyone first
Before Douyin, content on social products mostly travelled along the follow graph: you had to follow a set of people before your home screen had anything in it. New users followed few people, saw an empty feed and left.
Douyin removed that step.
A new user opens the app and, without following anyone, the first video starts playing. Whether you watch to the end or swipe away, how long you pause, whether you like it: all of it feeds the next recommendation. Showing one video per screen keeps that signal clean, because your reaction to one video is not mixed up with anything else on screen.
This decision meant a video’s reach no longer depended on how many followers its creator had. A brand-new account with zero followers can get pushed to more people if the first viewers respond well.
ByteDance had already done “algorithm instead of editors” once, with the news app Toutiao. Douyin took the same capability and applied it to video.
2017 to 2018: buying Musical.ly and merging it into TikTok
In 2017 ByteDance launched TikTok, the international version of Douyin.
In November that year ByteDance announced it would acquire Shanghai-based Musical.ly, for a price reported at about $1 billion. Musical.ly had more than 20 million daily users worldwide at the time, with more than 6 million active users in North America.
In August 2018 Musical.ly’s users were moved into TikTok and the original app ceased to exist on its own.
The deal gave TikTok a ready-made user base in North America and Europe. Many of the regulatory questions it later faced in the United States started from this acquisition.
From tens of millions of daily users to 700 million
Douyin’s growth curve:
| When | Number | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese New Year, Feb 2018 | 66.46 million | Peak daily users |
| January 2019 | 250 million | Daily users, officially announced |
| January 5, 2020 | 400 million | Daily users, Douyin data report |
| August 2020 | 600 million | Daily users, including Douyin Volcano |
| July 2026 | about 714 million | Daily users, reported by IT Home in September |
On TikTok’s side, the company announced on September 27, 2021 that it had passed 1 billion monthly users worldwide. According to third-party firm Sensor Tower, TikTok passed 2 billion monthly users worldwide in the first quarter of 2026.
From watching to buying
Douyin later did something neither Vine nor Musical.ly got to: selling things right where people watch videos.
Live-stream selling and product links under short videos turned Douyin’s e-commerce business into one of China’s largest within a few years. According to a November 2025 report by LatePost, Douyin’s e-commerce GMV grew more than 30% in the first ten months of 2025 and was expected to pass 4 trillion yuan for the year.
TikTok Shop started later. By third-party estimates its global GMV went from under $1 billion in 2021 to more than $64 billion in 2025.
The recommendation feed was built to keep people watching; commerce gave it a second outlet: see it, buy it. That is why Douyin’s business score reaches 94.
TikTok in the United States
TikTok’s experience in the US is part of this product’s story:
- In April 2024, Congress passed and the President signed a law requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US business or face a ban on distribution in the US
- Around January 19, 2025, TikTok briefly stopped working in the US and came back after a little over half a day
- On January 23, 2026, TikTok announced the formation of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC
According to TikTok’s announcement and several media reports, the joint venture is responsible for US data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance. Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX each hold 15%; ByteDance keeps 19.9% and is the largest single shareholder. ByteDance keeps the intellectual property of TikTok’s algorithm and licenses it to the joint venture. Commercial operations such as e-commerce, advertising and marketing sit with a TikTok US company wholly owned by ByteDance. More than 200 million US users can keep using the app.
Why it ranks #14
| Dimension | Score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Originality ORG | 90 | Short video was not its invention; Musical.ly’s lip-sync clips came first, and ByteDance had already replaced editors with an algorithm at Toutiao. What it originated was making the recommendation feed the home screen, combined with one full-screen video at a time, a format nearly every short video product then adopted |
| Scale SCL | 96 | Its highest. Douyin has about 700 million daily users; TikTok passed 2 billion monthly users by third-party data |
| Impact IMP | 95 | It changed how a generation finds content and fills time, and how many people shop |
| Experience EXP | 94 | Nothing to learn, no one to follow, nothing to pick: open it and it plays. This is the hardest part to replace |
| Business BIZ | 94 | Two legs, advertising and commerce; Douyin’s e-commerce GMV was expected to pass 4 trillion yuan in 2025 |
| Durability DUR | 88 | Its lowest. Only ten years old; in its category Vine has shut down and Musical.ly was absorbed; in the US, one of TikTok’s largest markets, a law required it to be divested |
Overall OVR 92.85, ranked #14.
Why durability is its lowest score at 88. Durability asks whether a product survives and whether the need it serves stays the same. Douyin is only ten years old. The precedents in its category are not reassuring: Vine shut down in 2017, and Musical.ly stopped existing on its own after it was acquired. Its overseas version faced a US law requiring divestment and stayed through a joint venture. Douyin is very strong today, but “will it still be here in ten years” can only score 88.
Against Alipay at #13, Douyin is 3 points higher on scale, 2 higher on experience, 1 higher on impact and on business, and 2 lower on originality. Those add up to a 0.80 lead for Douyin. Durability, 88 against 95, takes back 1.05 on its own, leaving Douyin 0.25 behind. Alipay has been doing the same job for twenty-three years: getting people to trust a payment.
Against Android at #15, originality at 85 is Android’s weak spot and its experience score is 6 points below Douyin’s; but Android scores 99 on scale and 95 on durability. After the pluses and minuses Douyin leads by only 0.10, one of the closest pairs in the top 15.
Ten years ago, Douyin was an app for shooting 15 seconds to a song. What let it take up so much of people’s time was not the video itself but one decision: don’t make the user choose first; let the system choose for them. That decision made it grow fast, and it is also why, in every country, it gets asked the same question: who is making the choices for all these people.
All scores and rankings in this article were produced by Claude (AI).
Sources: July 2026 time spent, daily users and year-on-year growth for Douyin and WeChat from IT Home and TechNode reports of September 9, 2026; A.me launch on September 26, 2016 and renaming to Douyin on December 22, 2016 from Baidu Baike and public reports; the February 2018 peak of 66.46 million daily users from Digitaling; 250 million daily users in January 2019, 400 million on January 5, 2020 and more than 600 million in August 2020 (including Douyin Volcano) from Economic Observer, 21st Century Business Herald and Cailian Press reports of Douyin’s official announcements; the Musical.ly acquisition at about $1 billion, its daily and North American user numbers and the August 2018 merger from The Paper and Tencent News; TikTok’s 1 billion monthly users on September 27, 2021 from TikTok’s official announcement (via Sina Tech); 2 billion monthly users in Q1 2026 (Sensor Tower) and TikTok Shop GMV (third-party estimates) from a Tencent News report of May 7, 2026; Douyin e-commerce’s 2025 GMV expectation from LatePost, November 20, 2025 (as cited by several outlets); the formation date, responsibilities, shareholdings and algorithm IP arrangement of the TikTok US joint venture from TikTok’s January 23, 2026 announcement and reports by National Business Daily and Cailian Press. The ranking scores the product, nothing else.
Discussion