Netflix’s competition is very clear if you ask us, but from the company they have always seen it differently. More than two years ago, Reed Hastings’s company already claimed that its great rival was not HBO, but Fortnite. If they asked him now, they might say TikTok, and it is that last summer, Netflix already publicly stated that it considered TikTok a new great competitor.
In that list of great rivals, the platform had placed YouTube or traditional TV years ago, but not to social networks like Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter or platforms like Twitch. There were mentions of Facebook at the time, but it is striking that given the changes in the last five years, they point to Tiktok and not to the others, which are still larger.
Today, the figures published by App Annie, one of the largest analytics and statistics consultancies on what happens on our mobiles, do not say the reasons for this growing respect for TikTok.
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In terms of time spent within the applications, globally TikTok made its place in the TOP 10 in 2019. In 2020, however, its growth was meteoric, placing itself in fifth place and well above Netflix, which remained eighth. In the first half of 2021, the reality has been exactly the same for both companies.
Yes, YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are still ahead of TikTok, but it is also necessary to assess more important sections in key markets, such as the variable of the average time spent on each service by its users, instead of adding all of them the hours spent on YouTube and TikTok in the world or in each country, which obviously favor the most established platforms by number of users.
TikTok not only grows in users, but also in the time they spend on average in their application. And it is against that time that Netflix competes
In that sense, App Annie shows us that (on Android) TikTok has overtaken YouTube in use in the United Kingdom and the United States (no data for Spain). In the United States, for example, 24 hours per month per user are spent on TikTok and 22 hours per month per user on YouTube. Quite a milestone considering where we come from.
The figures against Netflix are not given in this report, but first of all, this growth and sorpasso to the number 1 in time spent in app worldwide such as YouTube is a great warning of what is and what is to come. It is not fair to compare them directly with Netflix because both are free platforms and Netflix is not, but the trend is very indicative.
Data from Spain (in children and adolescents) support the trend
We also know that the TikTok phenomenon is still very adolescent, and that is probably another important factor for Netflix: that as that audience grows and TikTok becomes more transversal, its situation may get worse. In order to respond, Netflix has shown to know the strengths of TikTok in this culture of the ephemeral, and he’s running his own TikTok – a feed of short videos from his most popular comedies.
Who has provided comparative data for those two countries and for Spain, with a survey made in 2020 of 100,000 children / adolescents between 4 and 15 years old is Qustodio, as shown in this report. According to the study, Spanish children spent 65 minutes a day on TikTok in 2020, compared to 41 on Netflix. There is a difference, but what Netflix may worry about is how both figures have evolved: compared to 2019, TikTok has grown here by 109% and Netflix only 2.43%.
In the United Kingdom and the United States, according to Qustodio, Netflix has even fallen a lot (more than 25%) compared to 2019, something rare in a year of pandemic, while TikTok, as App Annie pointed out, has shot up to almost double the use per day.