Cloudflare, a content delivery network (CDN) service, recently released data suggesting that TikTok surpassed Google as the domain with the most recorded web activity in the closing months of 2021. Cloudflare’s Radar technology tracks web traffic throughout the web. Launched in the fall of 2020, the system analyses massive amounts of data as it moves through its network of servers around the world. It provides an overall view of trends, upcoming security concerns, and even internet bot activity based on an analysis of the data the CDN manages. For widely known domains, the system can also figure out how many people are visiting, as well as how many people live in a certain region for a seemingly endless number of web pages. The company says that it can keep an eye on some of the world’s most popular domains, as well.
Cloudflare says that TikTok.com, which is the underlying domain for the widely successful TikTok mobile app, had more visitors in the last few months of 2021 than Google.com, making it the number one site in the world. As Cloudflare points out, the Google.com domain also covers activity for a number of Google’s products, including Maps, Translate, News, and Photos. TikTok’s traffic, on the other hand, is limited to the app alone (not the domain page which Cloudflare claims to rank). And this traffic is solely based on an infinite stream of short videos and images.
Another thing to note: TikTok.com came first in the rankings, with Google second. Facebook came third. Comparatively, Google ranked #1 and Facebook ranked second for the same time period in 2020. TikTok was ranked seventh at that time.
According to Cloudflare, their rankings are based only on the data they have access to. Remember that the CDN is a third-party property and that, even though it has a wide reach, it may only see a small fraction of the data that goes around the web. This means that Cloudflare will almost certainly (but not necessarily) have to make educated guesses when it comes to determining the ratings for each domain, which is normal, of course.
If you look at the results of a research project, you should be wary of what you see. This is because researchers often use logic when they try to figure out what’s going on in insufficient sets of data. There are times when Netflix’s rankings have to be adjusted because of the quality of data they are using.
Nonetheless, TikTok ‘may’ well be more popular than Google, at least in relation to the number of visitors it receives on its app. To reiterate, the primary use of TikTok is to allow users to upload and view a limited number of short videos. On top of all that, the algorithm behind TikTok is set up to keep people as engaged as possible by presenting them with a stream of enjoyable moments sequentially.
In this case, every streamed video and every monitored user reaction would manifest themselves as a data packet sent across the channels, many of which Cloudflare is keeping track of. The same holds true for Google, as each search is counted as a visit to the Google.com website.
Because TikTok isn’t like this, Google Search is built to give users the best link as quickly as possible. People probably don’t stay on Google long after they search for something, which is very different from how TikTok works. TikTok.com is getting a lot of traffic, but it’s almost probably coming from a smaller user base than Google, which has a much larger audience.
