India's two-week ban cost TikTok 15 million users
New Delhi (CNN Business) One of China's top social media platforms saw its rapid growth braked by being temporarily shut out of India's market of 600 million internet users.
TikTok, the popular video-sharing app owned by Chinese tech giant Bytedance, missed out on adding more than 15 million users in the nearly two weeks it was blocked from downloads by the Indian government, according to a new report from analytics firm Sensor Tower.
Without the ban, April would have been TikTok's best month ever in India, the report said, adding that the app's global downloads dropped by an estimated 33% compared to the previous month.
TikTok declined to comment on the Sensor Tower report.
The app was banned in April after an Indian court ruled that it could expose children to sexual predators, pornographic content and cyberbullying. TikTok appealed the decision, saying it had cracked down on inappropriate content, and the court reversed its ruling. The government then gave Apple and Google permission to offer it for download again.
The world's biggest tech companies are falling over themselves to crack the Indian market, and TikTok has had big success so far, amassing more than 120 million users in India since it launched in 2016.
Senor Tower said it expects the Chinese video platform to bounce back quickly after being reinstated and made available for download earlier this week.
"Despite the brakes having been put on its growth in India, we expect TikTok to rebound quickly from this situation given its popularity and user base there," Sensor Tower founder Oliver Yeh said in the report. Yeh pointed out that millions of existing users in India were not affected by the ban.
TikTok has already surged back into the Top 10 of the Apple (AAPL) App Store, according to Sensor Tower, ranking first among photo and video apps and sixth overall. It's also rising fast on Google (GOOGL) Play Store.
Being shut out of India temporarily will have cost it more than users — Bytedance reportedly told the country's top court that it was losing $500,000 in revenue each day that TikTok was blocked.
