---
title: "Which came first, TikTok or YouTube?"
description: "TikTok vs YouTube: YouTube came first, by 11 years — 2005 against 2016. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/tiktok-vs-youtube/
site: "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.

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## Sources

- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place (/about/)
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]