It's tik tok time for TikTok. The platform has less than a month to sell its US operation to a local company or get banned. I doubt this drama will end with a sale or a bank by January 19th as the new law requires, but that's not stopping TikTok owner ByteDance from pushing its other properties.
Just in case?
Lemon8 is a ByeDance platform that's somewhere between Instagram and Pinterest focused on lifestyle using both photos and videos with a discovery feed similar to TikTok's and built-in shopping.
Although Lemon8 was launched alll the way back in 2020, it didn't start getting attention until 2022 where daily downloads jumped from under 10K to about 40K. That's when ByeDance started paying influencers to post on the platform actively.
Downloads showed a slight upward trend since, but overall remained fairly consistent. Our App Intelligence shows Lemon8 ending 2021 with 1.8M downloads, 2022 with 11M downloads, and 2023 with 17M downloads.
Let's zoom in on the US, Lemon8's biggest market. This year, Lemon8 has been averaging 225K downloads per week in the US. That's quite a few downloads for an app that requires a separate login even though it's owned by TikTok.
One little feature
Well, ByteDance changed that and that lifted Lemon8 to the top of the US App Store, where it's been for several weeks. It even became the #1 app in the US for a few days.
That little feature, letting users log in with their TikTok accounts, pushed downloads to their highest. Our App Intelligence shows weekly downloads rose to 426K, then 5558K, and then a whopping 805K in the last three weeks. This is by far Lemon8's best few days of downloads.
Lemon8 added ?? downloads since the feature was rolled out in November.
Why is this important?
ByteDance has a lot of power it's not really using with its other apps. Or at least wasn't until recently. But when it does, downloads skyrocket and so does revenue. We saw that happen with CapCut, ByteDance's video editor Capcut.
If TikTok is indeed about to get banned Lemon8 is positioned to keep ByteDance's space in the social space.
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