TikTok is earning money faster than any of its peer social media platforms did. And even now, its revenue is higher than that of Snap and Twitter combined. Would this achievement have anything to do with immediate adoption in China, where none of the other platforms did?

TikTok was reinvented from an app called Musical.ly and is probably 12 years old. Tiktok features include small videos, with infinite scroll, live explore explicit, with general videos, on light topics, with algorithms like no other.

The most overlooked feature: being able to quickly download your content to manipulate it as one sees fit in a closed or open ecosystem. Trading media-production capabilities for user-generated content is a trade creators will take daily.

However critics have listed the downsides of the app to be: It sees you when you’re sleeping. It knows when you’re awake. It knows when you’ve been bad or good. Apparently, collecting user data and keystrokes from children is a lucrative enterprise after all.

Credit: Nicolas Thompson, CEO -The Atlantic