Just last year, TikTok managed to make the list of the 10 most visited sites and managed to occupy the seventh place, behind Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix and Amazon. For 2021, the list has remained more or less the same, with Amazon taking the place of Netflix and of course TikTok at the top.

Cloudfare indicated in a blog post that comparing the statistics between the two years may reveal some inaccuracies in the numbers, as the company collected data from September to December 2020, while data collection began this year from the beginning of the year. According to Cloudflare, TikTok reached the top on February 17, 2021, with a few more days in March and June, while remaining at the end of August.

The app’s popularity soared during the pandemic, which initially attracted a teenage audience. Since then, it has intrigued users of all ages thanks to its rich content.

Although Cloudflare only provides data and does not provide analytics, signs that TikTok will make it to the top have been around since 2020, something it has finally achieved, surpassing Google and all related services (maps, translation, photos, flights, books, news, etc.). Notably, TikTok (the parent company of ByteDance is based in China), is the only company among the top 10 not to be located in North America.

Of course, this increase in traffic did not go unnoticed by advertisers, as on the same day that Cloudflare’s data was published, the New York Times published an article saying that retailers see the platform as the best marketing tool as they try to attract new audiences. According to NYT, investing in advertising on TikTok is a reliable source of revenue, with the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt viewed more than 7 billion times on the app.

As Krishna Subramanian, founder of marketing firm Captiv8 said, “The growth we have seen is outrageous. Companies have gone from just testing TikTok as a promotional platform, to creating groups exclusively for creating an ad campaign on TikTok.”