As major brands continue to shift their marketing budgets toward Influencers, TikTok is at the center of the conversation. The Gen Z-dominated platform with over 900m monthly users has been steadily gaining respect from advertisers across the board. Slowly but surely, TikTok ($774m) has taken the lead over Facebook ($739m) in influencer marketing spend in 2020. At this rate, it won’t be long until they surpass YouTube ($948m).

Since the pandemic, we’ve all seen the paradigm shift in media usage – social media apps consume most of our free-time these days. Of course, brands and advertisers want to know, “what’s the best platform to spend marketing dollars?”. Instagram still holds the crown for most budget spent on Influencers ($2.2B+) yearly, but that may change sooner than we think. Multiple household creators like Kylie Jenner are disappointed with the changes that Instagram has made in order to keep up with TikTok. It’s impossible to deny the impact TikTok has made on the media & entertainment industry when all its competitors have attempted to change their platforms in order to focus on short-form video content.

Some may say that TikTok has given people the opportunity to become a career content-creator overnight; others think TikTok is destroying our attention spans. One thing we know for sure – numbers don’t lie. Although the app began as somewhat of a meme in itself, TikTok has since grown to become a dominant force in popular culture. The speculation is that TikTok will continue to command higher marketing budgets year after year, and this is a trend that brands definitely shouldn’t blindly scroll past.