[ConcernedCitizen]

The popular app known by TikTok or Douyin (ByteDance) is #1 in the world this year.

In 2020 the video-sharing platform was ranked #7. Now, it's dethroned Google, followed by Facebook (Meta), Microsoft and Apple. This is a disturbance in the force.

This original news that got reposted everywhere is actually kinda bullsh*t, it's ranked 1st of top domains according to Cloudflare yes..
But it's apparently only about DNS requests, which doesn't mean much (microsoft.com and apple.com are respectively 4th and 5th in this ranking, which doesn't make much sense, it's obviously because of appstore & services requests, and netflix.com is above youtube.com!).
No secret tiktok is more and more popular, but would be better to base those claims on real meaningful data (like watch time or something?)

(of course I don't blame you, I blame the brainless journalists mostly ^^)

Good catch. I assumed it was referring to installed app count. Wikipedia lists TikTok as the most popular app by number of unique users in the United States as of the end of 2016. It was also not updated since February last year and the nature of the website makes it difficult how they came by these numbers other than one barely relevant news article that doesn't even mention TikTok to begin with.

This is why I don't read the news, barely any of it is real and half if it is pure ignorance.