Available data through late 2025 shows TikTok has not surpassed YouTube in overall global size or total engagement, and in fact remains substantially smaller.

User base / reach

• DataReportal-based estimates compiled by Backlinko put YouTube at about 2.5–2.54 billion active users in 2024–2025, nearly half of all internet users. (backlinko.com)
• Multiple 2025 summaries (DataReportal / Statista–based) place TikTok’s monthly active users around 1.6 billion, i.e., well below YouTube’s user base. (dreamgrow.com)
• Data.ai–indexed comparisons in the Digital 2025 report show YouTube as the most used social platform globally, with an active-user index of 100 versus TikTok around 48–48.3—meaning TikTok’s active user base is less than half of YouTube’s. (scribd.com)
• A separate social-media statistics compilation, based on DataReportal, explicitly states that TikTok’s active users are about 44.7% of YouTube’s, with YouTube ad reach ~2.5B vs. TikTok ~1.6B. (electroiq.com)
• Reuters reporting in September 2025 describes TikTok as having “over 1 billion” monthly users globally (and 200M in Europe), again clearly below the 2.5B+ range consistently cited for YouTube. (reuters.com)

Total time / engagement at platform scale

• The Digital 2025 Global Overview notes that YouTube still accounts for the greatest overall share of time spent on social platforms, with total time on YouTube exceeding TikTok and Instagram combined, even though TikTok has very high per-user engagement. (scribd.com)
• MarketWatch’s 2025 profile of YouTube’s 20th anniversary similarly describes YouTube as a media powerhouse with over 2.7 billion monthly active users and more than 1 billion hours watched per day on TVs alone, underscoring its continued dominance in total viewing time and revenue (about $36.1B in ad revenue in 2024). (marketwatch.com)

Was TikTok already “almost as big” in 2022?

• An August 2023 research paper by Touchstorm / VideoAmigo, doing an apples-to-apples comparison of global audiences, found that in 2023 YouTube had 2.3× more global unique active users than TikTok and roughly 2× the mobile audience. (newswire.com) Given TikTok user counts and bans in India, that ratio implies TikTok in 2022 was not “almost” as big as YouTube either.

Where TikTok does lead

• App Annie / data.ai and subsequent coverage show TikTok surpassed YouTube in average watch time per user on Android phones in the US and UK by 2020–2021 and continues to have very high per-user daily minutes. (thenationalnews.com) That supports a narrower claim about per-user engagement in certain markets, but not about global overall scale.

Assessment vs. the normalized prediction Friedberg’s normalized prediction was that TikTok was already nearly as big as YouTube in October 2022 and would soon surpass YouTube in overall size/scale (usage or engagement). As of late 2025, across the main global metrics that reasonably capture “overall size/scale” (total active users, ad reach, and total time spent), YouTube remains clearly larger—often by a factor of ~1.5–2× or more. TikTok has grown and leads on some per-user engagement measures, but it has not overtaken YouTube in overall global scale.

Therefore, the prediction is wrong.