TikTok Sets 2022 Target of $12B in Sales

After taking in close to $4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021, TikTok is planning to reach triple that number in 2022.

As the Chinese media outlet LatePost reported Thursday (Jan. 13), sources in the company’s sale department say the company wants to reach at least $12 billion in ad sales this year. And a source at ByteDance — the Beijing-based company that owns TikTok — says the video-sharing platform now has a sales team numbering in the thousands, primarily in North America.

Overall, the company has close to 20,000 workers, more than five times the number it had at the start of 2020.

Read more: TikTok Beats Google for Most Visited Site in 2021

Last year, TikTok was the most popular site on the internet, surpassing even Google. The year before, it overtook Facebook and WhatsApp to become the world’s most downloaded app.

The site’s users watch video clips from their smartphones or web browsers to watch, helped along by the site’s algorithms, which predict which videos users will find engaging.

Those algorithms have drawn significant interest in the digital-marketing world as they’ve fueled TikTok’s rapid rise to power.

However, TikTok still falls a bit short when it comes to advertising when compared to platforms like Facebook, LatePost notes. Facebook offers more complete user tags, with things like real names and user’s social relationships, allowing for more accurate ad recommendations.

And Facebook has more large customers, while most TikTok advertisers are — for now — small and medium-sized companies.

“This is also the reason why TikTok has begun to vigorously develop e-commerce in the past year: on the one hand, in order to open up new sources of income; more importantly, the e-commerce business is closer to big customers and big brands,” one of the sources told the news outlet. “Once it is established, advertisers will definitely be willing to … stay here.”

See: TikTok Seller App Manages Online Stores via Smartphones

Last year saw TikTok launched its Seller University service in Indonesia that was one of several tests of eCommercesolutions. The company also unveiled a suite of TikTok Shopping tools that allowed merchants to add a Shopping tab to their profiles and set up mini-storefronts through synced product catalogs.