Kids and teens are now spending more time watching videos on TikTok than on YouTube.
That’s been the case since June 2020 — the month when TikTok began to outrank YouTube in terms of the average minutes per day people ages 4 through 18 spent accessing these two competitive video platforms. That month, TikTok overtook YouTube for the first time, as this younger demographic began averaging 82 minutes per day on TikTok versus an average of 75 minutes per day on YouTube.
In the years since, TikTok has continued to dominate with younger users. By the end of 2021, kids and teens were watching an average of 91 minutes of TikTok per day compared with just 56 minutes per day spent watching YouTube, on a global basis.
Read Also: Meet The Woman Who Invented an Improved HIV Test
This new data is based on kids’ and teens’ use of TikTok and YouTube across platforms, which was compiled for TechCrunch by parental control software maker Qustodio using an analysis of 400,000 families who have accounts with its service for parental monitoring. The data represents their real-world usage of apps and websites, not an estimate.
And to be clear, these figures are averages. That means kids aren’t necessarily sitting down to watch an hour and a half of TikTok and an hour of YouTube every day. Instead, the data shows how viewing trends have changed over time, where some days kids will watch more online video than others, and will switch between their favorite apps.
However, the broader picture this data paints is one where the world’s largest video platform may be losing its grip on the next generation of web users — specifically, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Gen Z is typically thought to include people born between the mid- to late-1990s and the 2010s. Meanwhile, Gen Alpha — a generation whose childhood was put on pause by Covid, then driven online — includes those born after the early to mid-2010s.
In a prior annual report, Qustodio had analyzed kids’ app usage and found that TikTok was nearing YouTube in terms of average time spent. However, that report examined the data in a somewhat clunky fashion. It had included early 2020 app usage in a report largely focused on 2019 trends — a decision the firm had made at the time in order to highlight the increased connectivity taking place at the beginning of the pandemic. The report also focused on a handful of top markets, rather than global trends.
