TikTok's Video Editor is Eating Up the Market as YoY Revenue Rises 412%

Ariel Ariel
Apr. 26

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - A Big Quarter!. Check out the full article for more insights.


TikTok might get banned in the US, which could lead to other countries banning it, and in a way, the beginning of the end for the most downloaded social platform right now.

But there's another app owned by TikTok that's growing rapidly and crushing an industry that may have not seen it coming - and I'm not talking about Lemon8. I'm talking about CapCut, TikTok's video editing app.

If you've been following my writing you probably already know about CapCut, but if you haven't, CapCut is a standalone video editing app created by TikTok's parent company ByteDance.

CapCut is fully standalone and comes with a mobile and a desktop. It was free for a while and started charging a subscription at the end of 2020. It took over as the highest-earning video editing app last year, knocking down apps that have been around for a decade.

But its growth hasn't stopped there! The first quarter of 2024 has been CapCut's biggest in terms of revenue.

According to our estimates, CapCut earned $59M of net revenue in Q1 of 2024 worldwide, including the China-only version of the app. And, net means what ByteDance gets to keep after store fees.

That's a massive 44% increase from Q4 of 2023 and an even more massive 436% when compared to Q1 of 2023. Just a year ago!

CapCut's aggressive growth is directly related to TikTok's success (duh!) and interestingly enough, isn't a direct result of a massive ad campaign in the App Store. Which means, there's even more growth to be had!

CapCut's biggest driver of revenue is China, through a dedicated version of the app, with the US in second place with around a third of the revenue that's coming from China and no other countries big enough to notice.

I don't know what the competition can do at this point other than hope TikTok gets banned in the US...

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The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

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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.

Tagged: #video

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