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Which came first, Amazon or TikTok?

Which came first, Amazon or TikTok?
Amazon
1994 — 22 years before TikTok

Amazon came first, by 22 years. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.

Side by side

Amazon TikTok
Year 1994 2016
Date 1994-07-05
Category technology technology
What happened Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state. ByteDance launched Douyin in China; TikTok followed abroad in 2017.

Amazon

Amazon was incorporated on 5 July 1994, originally as Cadabra, and the website opened in July 1995 selling only books. The 1994 incorporation date is used here because it is the company's own founding date; if you mean the shop, 1995 is the answer. Either way it predates Google by three or four years and eBay by about a year.

TikTok

The app launched in China as Douyin in September 2016 and internationally as TikTok in 2017. What made it global was the 2018 acquisition and merger of Musical.ly, a lip-sync app that had launched in 2014 and already had a large Western user base — so part of TikTok is two years older than TikTok. Douyin and TikTok remain separate apps on separate infrastructure.

Common questions

Which came first, Amazon or TikTok?
Amazon, by 22 years — 1994 against 2016.
When did Amazon start?
1994. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.
When did TikTok start?
2016. ByteDance launched Douyin in China; TikTok followed abroad in 2017.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)
  2. Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place

How these figures are compiled and checked