TikTok is becoming the number one internet search engine for teens, even more so than Google itself .
Around 40% of teen users prefer platforms like TikTok or Instagram to search, rather than Google Maps or Google Search .
It is one of the conclusions reached by Google in a survey of US users between the ages of 18 and 24, which has not transpired at the moment, and which was recently mentioned by Serious Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan during the Brainstorm Tech conference.
The manager has insisted that this is mainly due to the change in the way of consuming content by the younger generations, taking into account that they are digital natives and are used to audiovisual formats .
“Something like 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place to eat, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram. This process starts in different ways than before, with visual formats,” Raghavan has commented, as reported by Fortune .
Based on this, the technology company is betting on the development of visual products, for which it has implemented technologies based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as Google Lens.
In addition, it has implemented other measures to streamline searches within its platforms, such as on YouTube, which currently allows users who do not want to fully watch long videos to skip to the parts that may interest them the most.
More TikTok than YouTube
The format offered by TikTok seems to be more convincing to the younger generations since, according to data from the software developer company Qustodio to which TechCrunch has had access , the number of users of this platform has only grown in recent years. last two years.
Specifically, since June 2020, this platform began to surpass YouTube in terms of average minutes per day used by users between the ages of 4 and 18. This demographic reached 82 minutes per day connected on TikTok , compared to 75 minutes per day on YouTube.
These figures were exceeded in 2021, since at the end of this year children and adolescents consumed the platform managed by ByteDance an average of 91 minutes per day, compared to the 56 minutes per day they spent watching YouTube.
Another of the breakdowns that Qustodio has provided to this medium includes data by country, including the United States and the United Kingdom.
While in the United States the average time spent on TikTok in 2019 was 44 minutes, in 2020 it was 87 and in 2021 it was 99, in the United Kingdom it went from 37 minutes in 2019 to 102 minutes in 2021 (going through an average of 70 minutes). connected to the platform in 2020).
Platforms with similar formats
Because TikTok has become the platform of reference for younger users, the rest of the services are implementing a series of tools very similar to those offered by the application of Chinese origin.
Google , for example, launched YouTube Shorts a year ago , an experience of short vertical videos of 15 to 60 seconds, with which it offers its own version of the TikTok social network format and has recently implemented new editing tools for iOS .
Meta, for its part, has begun to test a new design of the Instagram feed to offer content in full screen, very similar to the TikTok format , a movement with which the company intends to give more prominence to videos and images. included in this section.
Likewise, the company recently confirmed that it was working on a new option for this social network, which converts all the videos that are published into ‘reels’, a tool that some of its users are already having access to.