This Meme Earned Big Money for TikTok

Ariel Ariel
9/3/21

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #77 - That's Not Going to Happen!. Check out the full article for more insights.


TikTok's U.S. revenue jumped to its highest single-day figure last week. And not by a little.

It grew 50% from its last highest peak (in early August), 3x what it was back in January of this year, and a whopping 6x from January of 2020.

But, how?

A mysterious meme!

It took me a bit to uncover this one, but the source of the commotion, which led to this revenue explosion, is a meme that no one really knows the origins of but seems to have taken over TikTok. That member is all about August 27th. Insider covered it in more detail.

I'm still not sure what it's all about, but I do know the numbers. Net revenue in the U.S. reached $725K last Friday, 8/27, the most revenue TikTok has seen in a single day.

What's the big deal? TikTok gets a lot of money, how's that news? Well, it's not about the specific figures but rather about the sheer power TikTok's userbase has. We've seen it causing big waves for apps that get caught by influencers and its impact on creators. With this spike, we can also see how easy it is to mobilize this userbase.

There's more we can read into in that last sentence that would take a whole separate article to dig into, but even without doing that, it's pretty clear that TikTok is now the trend maker.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.


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