As of February 2025, the United States was the region with the largest TikTok audience by far, with almost ****** million users engaging with the popular social video platform. Indonesia followed, with around ***** million TikTok users. Brazil came in third, with almost ***** million users on TikTok watching short-videos. From Reels to Shorts: social short video takes the internet Between 2021 and 2022 some of the most popular social media platforms have been adding short-video features on the heels of TikTok’s popularity. YouTube Shorts, which rolled out to the global market in June 2021, reached *** billion monthly active logged-in users in 2023. In comparison, Instagram’s short-video format Reels, which launched in August 2020, presented a higher view rate than regular videos on the platform between June 2021 and June 2022, as well as a higher likes rate than other content types on Instagram. TikTok business model TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance, along with the short-video app Douyin (TikTok’s version for the Chinese market), video platform Xigua, and popular news app Toutiao. While the products intended for domestic market consumption operate in the Chinese digital ecosystem and have a plurality of established monetization methods such as a live-shopping events hosted by famous influencers, TikTok’s main revenue stream comes from online advertising. In 2022, TikTok was estimated to have generated around **** billion U.S. dollars worldwide via online advertising.

As of January 2025, approximately ** percent of TikTok users surveyed in Brazil stated they followed influencers on the platform. Around ** percent said they followed companies or brands, whereas ** percent reported purchasing a product or service recommended by someone on the mobile app. According to the same study, the share of Brazilian TikTok users believing that brands should be on the platform reached ** percent in 2025.

According to a survey conducted in June 2022, ** percent of TikTok users in Brazil were aged 19-29 years. The share of users aged between 30 to 49 years old has decreased * percentage points since the previous year, while the distribution of those older than 50 years remained the same. Furthermore, ** percent of the social video platform in the country were women.

This dataset was initially used in the paper "The use and impact of TikTok in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election". It contains data from official TikTok accounts of the two main candidates running for the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, Lula (@lulaoficial) and Bolsonaro (@bolsonaromessiasjair). It was collected 576 posts of the candidates and more than 540 million interactions on these posts. Data encompass three periods of 2022: (i) Pre-campaign (Jun 30 to Aug 15); (ii) 1st round campaign (Aug 16 to Oct 1); and (iii) 2nd round campaign (Oct 2 - Oct 29). It contains two files. (i) Accounts: How many followers the candidate has, on a day-to-day basis, starting on Sept 5; and (ii) Posts and interactions: Individual data and metrics of each post, including date of the post, text, link for the post, number of plays, likes, comments and shares.

As of September 2024, social media influencer Virginia Fonseca da Costa was the most followed TikTok account in Brazil, with around 38 million followers. She was followed by social media star Beca Barreto, and TV and movie actress Larissa Manoela, with 30.7 and 30.3 million followers each.

In the third quarter of 2024, TikTok generated 12.01 million downloads in Brazil, down from 23.8 million registered in the same quarter of the previous year. The social video app generated over 3.04 million U.S. dollars in revenue during the same period.

Context

US Supermarkets have seen a recent shortage of Feta Cheese due to a TikTok pasta that went viral. "https://www.fox5ny.com/news/viral-tiktok-video-recipe-prompts-feta-cheese-shortage"

The Brazilian music industry is already experiencing huge shifts in it's business model, TikTok changed young people playlists. Most of the biggest players in this market realized the day-light revolution of music going on, and are trying to influence as much as possible something many believe to be random: songs going viral.

Content

This data contains 10.000 rows, each describing a single video. Along with that, there are 14 columns: username, user id, video id, video desc, videotime, video length, video link, n likes, n shares, n comments, n plays, music name, music url

Acknowledgements

Thank you David Teather for developing a nice and easy-to-use API.

In the third quarter of 2024, TikTok generated an app revenue of around 3.04 million U.S. dollars in Brazil, up from 2.9 million U.S. dollars from the first quarter of this year. The social video app generated over 12 million U.S. downloads during the same.

In November 2024, mobile TikTok users in Chile spent an average of ** hours and ** minutes per month on the social video app via Android, while the engagement of users in Mexico stood at around ** hours and ** minutes monthly. TikTok also the first-ranked app in terms of average mobile user engagement in Mexico. In Argentina, users spent ** hours and ** minutes on the app monthly, making it the most used social media platform in the country. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the app was used for a monthly average of ** hours and ** minutes.

According to a survey during the third quarter of 2024, 39.8 percent of online audiences in Brazil stated that Instagram was their favorite social media platform, with a usage reach of 92 percent among the online population. WhatsApp followed as the social platform of choice for around 31.2 percent of the respondents. Despite the significant growth of the platform, only 7.1 percent of Brazilian internet users said that TikTok was their favorite platform, while Facebook was preferred by 6.8 percent of the Brazilian internet users.

As of September 2024, YouTube, WhatsApp, YouTube Kids and TikTok were the most used apps by children of various age groups in Brazil. YouTube's mainstream version was the most popular platform among children between ***** and 12 years old, with its YouTube Kids spin-off being used by more than ** percent of children with ages younger than *** year old to six years old. Meanwhile, WhatsApp is gradually more popular among older age groups, coming from ** percent usage rate among the youngest children to ** percent among those aged between 13 to 16 years old.

Brazil alone concentrated more than ten percent of all 104.7 million downloads of the TikTok app made during January 2020. That means TikTok was downloaded almost 10.9 million times in the South American country throughout that month, which is over two times more the 4.99 million installs of TikTok recorded in Brazil in December 2019.

According to a survey conducted in June 2022, 52 percent of TikTok users in Brazil were women, a decrease of two percentage points from the previous year. Meanwhile, men accounted for 48 percent of TikTok users in the country.

As of March 2023, over one-quarter – ** percent – of TikTok users surveyed in Brazil agreed that the social media platform had too many advertisements. Around ** percent of respondents disagreed with that statement. That year, Brazil was the third-largest TikTok market in the world.

Launched first in India after the TikTok ban in August 2020, YouTube Shorts rolled out globally in June 2021. The feature, which is accessible via the YouTube app, reached two billion monthly logged-in users as of July 2023. YouTube has been heavily promoting its short-video format platform since its global launch, including redirecting users automatically to Shorts when the YouTube app is opened and launching the YouTube Shorts Funds to entice creators' participation. In 2022, user and travel vlogger Shangerdanger took the crown for the most popular Short on YouTube, with his video “Diver cracks Egg at 45 ft Deep".

TikTok versus Reels: competitors’ comparison Launched in September 2016 in China as Douyin, TikTok went on to become of the most engaging social media platforms for global users, challenging mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube in their primary markets such as the United States, Brazil, and Japan. TikTok’s popularity exploded between 2019 and 2020, as the work was experiencing the effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Reels, Instagram’s in-app short video experience, debuted in 2020 as Facebook (now Meta Platforms) bet on the short-video feature to improve users’ engagement. While videos were an already popular format on Facebook and Instagram, social short videos soon became an even more popular format with users. As of June 2022, the average video viewing rate for Reels on Instagram was 2.54 percent, while for videos was of 1.74 percent as of June 2022.

Content is key: creators drive an entire economy As of July 2022, influencers on TikTok and YouTube generate the largest share of video views, over 90 percent, while content produced by media companies and brands constitute only a smaller part of the video views generated on the two video platforms. As content creators are emerging even more clearly as the backbone of social media marketing and advertising, it is not a surprise that an entire economy devoted to their needs and presence has developed in recent years. In 2022, companies supporting the creators’ economy by offering merchandising services had an annual average revenue of over 500 million U.S. dollars, while companies overseeing subscription services generated approximately 300 million U.S. dollars.

According to a 2024 survey, around ** percent of Brazil's TikTok users leaned toward a Right-wing political position. Besides being used by the majority of the country's population, TikTok also reflected the general political landscape among users of other social media platforms in the country.

The most followed Brazilian influencer on TikTok in June 2022 was Larissa Manoela (@larissamanoela) with around **** million followers on the platform. Comedian Tirulipa (@tirulipa) ranked second, with around **** million thousand followers. TikTok was expected to have the biggest users growth rate in Latin America when compared to other social platforms, and is expected to reach around ***** million users by 2025.

In the first half of 2023, TikTok received 16 law enforcement agency requests for user information from Brazil. During the first half of 2022,TikTok received 95 user data requests, which was the highest number registered in the country.

As of March 2023, approximately ** percent of TikTok users surveyed in Brazil reported purchasing something after clicking on an advertisement on the platform. That year, Brazil was the third-largest TikTok market in the world.

During the first quarter of 2022, around 4.78 million videos were removed from social video platform TikTok in Brazil, up from 3.94 million during the previous quarter of 2021. In total, 94.1 percent of TikTok video removals in Brazil occurred before any content views.