BEIJING, October 18  (TMTPOST)— TikTok seems on the track of a milestone—to attract more than 1 billion users to use the leading short video app each day.

Source: Visual China

TIkTok has set a target of global daily active users (DAUs) at more than 1.05 billion by the end of 2022, up from the current level of more than 800 million, Tencent’s online media outlet LatePost cited insiders of the wolrd’s largest short video platform. The target suggests a really ambitious milestone for TikTok since only four apps across the world boast over 1 billion DAUs, including YouTube, Facebook and its two sister apps WhatsApp and Instagram. Currently, around 900 million netizens use Tencent’s WeChat, one of the most popular social media in China, while TikTok and other apps under ByteDance have an average DAU of 730 billion.

LatePost learned that TikTok also hopes its less than 20% of international penetration rate increase to the same as Douyin, the Chinese version TikTok in mainland China that boasts nearly 54% of penetration.  The penetration target suggests TikTok has to add over 2 billion new DAUs across the world.

The worldwide DAUs on TikTok platform hit 1 billion at afternoon on October 18, Beijing Time, Chinastarmarket.cn, or Kechuangban Daily, a Chinese tech news media outlet learned from insiders of TikTok parent ByteDance Tuesday. The massive DAU once triggered online sign-in alerts, which led to temporary expansion of server to enable new users’ access, according to the sources. The user growth made TikTok the fifth app in the world that has over 1 billion DAUs, following, the media indicated.

However, neither TikTok nor its owner confirmed the report.  The recent news about 1 billion DAUs is untrue, people at ByteDance told other Chinese media later Tuesday.

While TiTok reportedly aims to generate revenue of US$12 billion this year, 200% increasing from the year 2021 that had approximate US$4 billion, LatePost said its ad revenue missed the target in the first half of the year as its growth saw slowdown, which resulted from various factors, such as the Russia-Ukraine war, the cooling digital ad spending hit by high inflation, TikTok’s weaker ad conversion than Facebook, Google and other rivals and its bumpy way to win major overseas clients.