The Rundown: Even with 1B active users, TikTok still lacks lots of basics – Digiday

September 29, 2021 by Max Willens TikTok rode global youth enthusiasm, hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spending — much of it with competitors — and a pandemic-fueled shift in consumer behavior into the Billion Active Users Club this year.  But for a platform with so much scale, TikTok is still missing a lot of the basic leadership and technological infrastructure that will define its next phase of audience and advertising growth, according to advertising executives as well as a number of recently published job listings.  The key details: On Sept. 27, ByteDance told Reuters that TikTok has 1 billion monthly active users. Analysts had forecast that TikTok would cross the billion-user mark this year, with eMarketer forecasting it would grow to 1.2 billion.That represents 45% growth year over year, and exponential growth over the past three years; at the beginning of 2018, TikTok said it had 55 million global users. Much of that growth was driven by ads TikTok bought on rivals’ platforms: In 2019, close to 80% of its ad budget went to Snapchat, and in 2020, 73% of it went to Facebook. (This year, the greatest share of its ad spending has gone to broadcast TV.)TikTok remains…
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