While its fate in the U.S. hangs in the balance, TikTok could add a new data point to its massive growth story through the amount of internet traffic its app captures relative to other digital giants that dominate the world.
Chinese brands will overtake Amazon and Apple to join the top five bandwidth consumers in 2023, according to annual data from Sandvine, which tracks mobile and fixed networks around the world.
TikTok trails only Meta and Alphabet among mobile traffic cloggers, and behind Netflix and Microsoft among fixed network leaders. In addition to Apple and Amazon, which lag behind TikTok, Disney+ also ranks among the top eight “super giants”, accounting for 65% of all fixed traffic on the Internet (mainly video, which is by far the most used), according to Internet data s application).
But Sandvine pointed to the “rapid rise” of TikTok, which contributes about 173 terabytes of average daily traffic on mobile devices, with at least 36% of global mobile users accessing the service every day.
This 36% is even slightly higher than Meta’s competitors Facebook and Instagram (both 35%), and far ahead of social media competitor X (only 16%).
On fixed networks, TikTok’s 64% user base is the highest share of any brand on fixed or mobile networks in any category (including audio, cloud gaming, communications, TV, on-device gaming, IoT and conferencing).
However, YouTube remains the clear leader in most categories, including in the US, where it still tops the list with 14% of downstream traffic, while Amazon Prime and Netflix are tied for second with 11%. TikTok ranks seventh with a 3% share.
The data is a representative sample of customer reports from dozens of Sandvine fixed and mobile networks, involving tens of millions of users around the world, and is anonymized and aggregated.