Facebook To Launch A New App To Compete With TikTok

Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook’s employees last summer that the company needed to launch its competitor of TikTok before the Chinese-based company became too large and powerful.

This intention of Zuckerberg is to counterweigh the increasing popularity of TikTok was uncovered via leaked audio of two internal meetings that took place in July.

In the meeting, one employee raised the question of if Zuckerberg was concerned by the massive growth of the short-video sharing platform. After that, he explained TikTok was the very first Chinese company to become Facebook’s major competitor in the world. Zuckerberg said that TikTok, woned by ByteDance, a China-based company was doing quite well, and in India alone, the app had surpassed Instagram in terms of popularity.

He went on to say that the app is now extremely popular among young people in the US and India.

He did not say on which metric he based on to have such a conclusion, but it is true that TikTok’s popularity in India is huge. According to Sensortower, in the first month of 2018, 9.5% of the app’s new users were from India, but a year later, this figure has risen to 43%.

He said that releasing a strong competitor was one of the plans to beat the Chinese platform. What he was referring to was Lasso and the company planned to launch it in markets where the Chinese platform has not yet had a solid standing, for example, Mexico. Facebook's CEO said that the company would try to launch the app and make it works in countries where TikTok has not yet gained its momentum and then expand to the nations where the Chinese platform is dominant.