Here is why YouTube is better than TikTok

And why it always will be better.

So you’re scrolling mindlessly through your Medium feed, and you’re eyes glance over a quite controversial title. The title states that “YouTube is dead and that there is something new that’s replacing it”.

You’re quite surprised but curious at the same time, so you decide to read the article. You soon discover that this new thing is supposed to be TikTok.

The rhetoric behind why YouTube is dying is that:

1. Its algorithm favors the content of celebrities above the content of the average folks.
2. The app is supposed to be catered toward adults and not the youth.
3. And third, because it’s not the number one downloaded app anymore.

Let’s break it down.

First things first, always check the stats and their resources

Granted, stating numbers and stats to prove an argument is the most reliable way to show to truth, and data can give us a good perspective of what’s going on in the world.

But it also can be very misleading if it’s presented wrongly or if it’s coming from an unreliable source. Especially when it’s done the way it’s been done through this Medium article.

Let me explain.

The article states that TikTok is now more popular than YouTube because “it amazed over 1 billion active users” and it generated the highest downloads in one single quarter.

First things first, let’s look at the source.

You just have to click on that link to discover that it leads to another blog post from a website called promo.com. This blog post, which presents an overall picture of whether to host your videos on TikTok or YouTube, presents data on how both apps are performing right now.

So the source is not a “report” (as stated in that Medium article), but just a blog post that’s being written by promo.com.

Interesting. But it still has statistics so let’s look into that.

Checking out these statistics and we found out that this blog post refers to yet another source; kind of a never-ending rabbit hole to go into.

But I went into that rabbit hole and found out that TikTok is expected to reach 1.8 billion users by the end of 2022.

So it hasn’t reached those 1.8 billion users yet.

Any idea how many users TikTok has right now?

Well, if we scroll down we find quite interesting numbers. We learn that TikTok has 1.2 Billion users while YouTube is still dominating the scene with 2.5 Billion users.

“Unlike YouTube, TikTok’s audience is large and growing”

One of the author’s arguments on why YouTube is dying is that “unlike YouTube, TikTok’s audience is large and growing”.

This is a misleading way of proving a point because of multiple factors.

First of all, the only thing that the “source” (you know, promo.com) is stating, is that TikTok is been downloaded more than 2 billion times across iOS and Android since it’s been launched.

Again, this data is just half the equation and thus we can’t conclude from it that something is “large and growing”.

Here is why.

First of all, downloading an App doesn’t mean that it is been used. Granted, 2 billion downloads is a large number. So if only 50 percent of the people who downloaded TikTok actually use the app, we still will have an average of 1 billion users.

Nowadays, big tech companies like YouTube, TikTok, and the like, don’t only get their traffic from iOS or Android apps, but also from their web apps. And this is a better way of tracking user behavior, because you then know for a fact that one visit means also one person who is actually using the platform

And according to Similar Web (a respectable company whose main focus is presenting objective traffic web data), is YouTube still getting over 30 Billion visits every single month with an average visit duration of 21 minutes.

TikTok on the other hand receives 1.8 billion visits with an average visit duration of just under 4 minutes.

I guess the author forgot to mention these numbers as well. Or maybe, he was too occupied reading data from promo.com

YouTube’s short feature

Yes, YouTube created a short feature to keep up with the ever-shrinking attention span of humanity. They noticed that it worked on TikTok and they implemented the same idea on their website.

That’s not an argument for why YouTube is dying. It’s called keeping up with the trends, just like every other business does.

Stating that YouTube had to “mimic TikTok’s short-form videos” and thus it is dying, is, again, a very misleading way of proving an argument.

Especially when this point is reinforced by another misleading argument, which is:

YouTube has “an aging audience” while TikTok “has captured younger generations”.

Where is this coming from? No data on the internet states that YouTube has an “aging audience” ( I also looked in that blog post that’s been presented earlier as a source, you know, promo.com, and found nothing).

In fact,

According to the US internet population statistics, the 18–25 year age category makes up the largest visitor base of YouTube.

And keep in mind, this statistic on its own only tells us that the 18–25 year age makes up the largest visitor base of YouTube. We still don’t know what the percentage is of let’s say children between 3 and 18 years old.

YouTube’s algorithm favors content of celebrities

I’m not gonna waste a lot of words on this one, so here is just 1% of the list of “independent users” who made it on YouTube:

Unbox Therapy, MKBHD, Mr. Beast, James Jani, Ali Abdaal, Coffeezilla, Penguinz0, Johnny Harris, Joshua Weissman, Moon, Coldfusion, Polymatter, Aperture…

And the list goes on and on.

All these people weren’t celebrities when they started their YouTube journey.

Wrapping up

Look, I can write books about why these kinds of articles are misleading in a very big way, but I’m not going to bother you with more text that is made up of statistics.

What I can tell you is that these people know that publishing these kinds of articles will lead to more clicks, reads, and engagements (whether positive or negative doesn’t matter for the algorithm).

But let’s be honest here and let’s look at the facts:

YouTube offers a tremendous amount of value compared to TikTok. You can really find all sorts of things on YouTube, from “How to program in Python” videos to cooking recipes.

TikTok on the other hand is nothing more than short-form crap videos, and their main focus is to keep the end user hooked on scrolling to the next video.

Try scrolling for 30 minutes on TikTok and you will end up brain-dead (I don’t recommend it though).

If you’re on the verge of starting a YouTube channel, please don’t let these types of articles hold you back. Just keep in mind that you too can make it on YouTube and you don’t have to be a celebrity. YouTube’s future is still very bright, but you need to put the work into it. Just like with anything else in life.

Thanks for reading until the end : )

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