In the past two years, TikTok, which has dominated the US application market, has encountered a competitor, and this competitor is not yet a newcomer, but rather Meta's Instagram.

According to the latest data from market intelligence company Sensor Tower, the total number of app downloads on Instagram increased by 20% year-on-year in 2023, reaching 768 million downloads, making it the most downloaded app in the world. In contrast, the number of TikTok downloads under ByteDance only increased by 4% over the same period to 733 million times.

Instagram's comeback is mainly due to its short video sharing feature similar to TikTok. In 2020, Instagram launched the "reels" feature, which allows users to share short videos and allows many users to enjoy similar features without downloading TikTok.

Abraham Yousef, Senior Insight Manager at Sensor Tower, said, "In the past few years, Instagram has surpassed TikTok in popularity, thanks to its" reels "feature and the popularity of traditional social media features and features."

Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik stated that Instagram has successfully retained existing users of its application by launching short videos, which means "the next batch of potential TikTok users no longer have the motivation to switch platforms."

He added that more and more internet celebrities are also being attracted to Instagram. Shmulik said that for these "internet celebrities", TikTok is a place where they are more likely to "explode" overnight, while Instagram is a better platform to make money from fan groups.

Although TikTok has rapidly developed by providing users with short videos tailored to their preferences through its algorithms, Meta invested heavily in the field of artificial intelligence last year to improve its algorithms. The CFO of Meta stated last month that Instagram has made significant progress in increasing the freshness of recommended content.

At the same time, the slowing growth of TikTok's active users has also given Instagram an opportunity to take advantage of.

According to Sensor Tower's data, Instagram's monthly active users reached 1.47 billion and continue to grow, with a growth of 13 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. In contrast, TikTok had 1.12 billion active users and decreased by 12 million in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Instagram also benefits from the promotion policy of ByteDance. This policy allows users to download videos with TikTok watermarks and share them on different social media platforms. The policy was originally aimed at increasing the visibility of this Chinese application. However, many users now move TikTok videos to other platforms, including Instagram.

However, based on the indicator of user usage time, TikTok is still undoubtedly the king. According to Sensor Tower data, in the fourth quarter of last year, the average usage time of TikTok users on the application was as high as 95 minutes, while the average usage time on Instagram was 62 minutes. The average usage time for users of other social media apps is even shorter, with X being 30 minutes and Snapchat being only 19 minutes.

In addition to user usage time, TikTok is also far ahead of Instagram in e-commerce. Sensor Tower estimates that ByteDance earned more than $4 billion in revenue last year through the sales of goods on applications, while Instagram's revenue of the same kind was $143 million.