TikTok Leads Christmas Day Obtain Charts, New Markers of the Coming Metaverse Shift

TikTok is expected to continue its growth momentum well into 2022, with the short-form video app at the top of the download charts on Christmas Day, while VR and the wider Metaverse shift also saw some key consumer indicators in the app tracking company’s latest data App Annie.

First of all, about the total downloads – as you can see in the table below, gIn general, TikTok leads the way at Christmas, ahead of Instagram and Facebook.

Snapchat remained popular while alongside the top messaging apps Shopee, a major e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia, also gained momentum with consumers.

TikTok editing app CapCut also made it into the top 10, further underscoring the app’s popularity and with predictions that TikTok will achieve 1.5 billion users Sometime in 2022, it’s pretty clear that it’s now the main app of choice, especially for young users, which is a major change for all social media marketers.

If you don’t have a TikTok strategy now, whether it’s just to listen and watch the latest trends or for wider promotion and reach, it’s clearly time to think about it.

But perhaps even more interesting are the trends reflected in the region-specific download charts, especially in the US:

As per App Annie:

“In the USA, Oculus was Number 1 in downloads on Christmas Day when the Americans unpacked new Oculus Virtual Reality (VR) headsets under the tree. This builds on the growing trend towards metaverses and immersive experiences. “

The broader metaverse shift, as evidenced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will likely take place in VR, so it is important for Meta to see increased adoption of its VR headsets to usher in the next level of digital connectivity. If Meta can own the VR room, it can effectively own the Metaverse itself and become the main hosting platform that other developers must align with in order to connect with users in this growing new world of opportunity.

We’re not there yet, and what exactly the metaverse will be is not defined as such. But the wider adoption of Meta’s VR tools is a key indicator of the growing interest.

And as one market analyst recently noted:

A great, functional, viral, trending VR app, and you’ll see the VR impulses accelerate quickly and the current metaverse discussion of NFTs and similar early adopter trends peter out.

Could Grand Theft Auto VR be that killer app?

Another important point in the US charts is the popularity of the MMO game Roblox, which, similar to Minecraft, has become a permanent platform for young players.

However, a particularly important trend in the case of Roblox is that it has also become an important social link for young users who have been deprived of face-to-face interaction for the past two years due to the pandemic. This could make it an even more embedded and critical social tool in addition to being a game and leisure platform, effectively laying the foundation for the future metaverse structure.

In-game spending on character skins and digital products is also high at Roblox (Roblox was the top game in the world for consumer spending on Christmas Day), and for the next generation of consumers, this is already normal, habitual behavior to suggest suggests where the trend will be in the next decade as these adolescents enter adulthood.

If you want to get a feel for what the Metaverse is going to be, Roblox is the best indicator in a basic framework, with a wide range of user-generated and developer-contributed elements that blend into the wider game world that users then inhabit for hours each Day.

The pandemic has compounded this, and it is now an important platform to watch. And while I would expect the broader metaverse to be much more advanced, the platforms and vendors who want to create tools that connect to the larger metaverse structure, rather than those offering one-off profile pictures or 2D digital art, will prevail which has no direct connection to the room.

In this respect, apps like ‘Ready Player Me‘which focuses on building cross-platform avatars and hosting platforms like Meta’s VR section people should really be looking for. Unless next-gen developers have a plan or roadmap that involves building for the logs of the larger hosts and networks, then they don’t have a metaverse plan at all. And even then, it is still too early to know the universal schemes and requirements to be really “metaverse-ready”.

In other words, if you want to understand the next level of digital connection, look not at images of bored monkeys and pixelated characters, but at platforms like Roblox, where young users are already setting the new norms of future space.

You can see the full download history of App Annie for Christmas here.