At One Place

Which came first, TikTok or YouTube?

Which came first, TikTok or YouTube?
YouTube
2005 — 11 years before TikTok

YouTube came first, by 11 years. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

Side by side

TikTok YouTube
Year 2016 2005
Date — 2005-02-14
Category technology technology
What happened ByteDance launched Douyin in China; TikTok followed abroad in 2017. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

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.

YouTube

The youtube.com domain was registered on Valentine's Day 2005, the first video — "Me at the zoo", 19 seconds of a co-founder at San Diego Zoo — was uploaded on 23 April, and the site opened publicly in the winter. Google bought it in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, about twenty months after the domain was registered. It is younger than Facebook by a year and older than Twitter by one.

Common questions

Which came first, TikTok or YouTube?
YouTube, by 11 years — 2005 against 2016.
When did TikTok start?
2016. ByteDance launched Douyin in China; TikTok followed abroad in 2017.
When did YouTube start?
2005. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

Related pages

Sources

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

How these figures are compiled and checked