We already saw a wealth of digital milestones in the first six months of 2024, but the big headlines keep coming as we enter the second half of the year.

Our new Digital 2024 July Global Digital Statshot Report – published in partnership between Meltwater and We Are Social – delivers plenty of impressive numbers and trends, together with a rich selection of insights into how the world’s digital behaviours are evolving.

The ultimate collection of digital data

This quarter’s reports feature an exceptional wealth of data and insight, thanks to the support and generosity of our wonderful data partners:

Content authenticity

All of this analysis was written by a human, without the use of generative AI. If you’d like to say hello to that human, give me a wave on LinkedIn, and let me know what you found most interesting or surprising in this latest report.

⚠️ Important notes

Please note the following before you dive into this latest round of data:

Starting with this July 2024 report, we’ve introduced some significant changes to the structure of the sections within the Global Digital reports series. The good news is that we haven’t removed anything, but we have changed the order in which the slides appear within the report. The most obvious change is that slides which previously appeared within the Mobile section have now been integrated into other sections of the report, such that there is now no standalone Mobile section. We’ve also moved various slides that previously appeared in the Internet section into their own dedicated sections, in order to group similar behaviours and trends together in more obvious ways. You’ll also find some more new charts in this quarter’s update, so look out for those in the full report below.
Starting with the most recent Q1 2024 wave of research, GWI now offers data for audiences aged 65 and above in a selection of markets. We’re very excited about this change, but do note that the addition of these new audiences has had a meaningful impact on many of the GWI-sourced values that we include in our reports. As a result, many values in our latest report are not comparable with values for the same data points that we published in previous reports. This is partly because people over the age of 65 have quite different behaviours, preferences, and interests compared with younger audiences, and partly because data for this older age group is currently only available in a subset of GWI’s markets. This is due to the fact that it’s considerably more challenging to survey a representative sample of people aged 65+ than it is to survey people aged 16 to 64, because the older group includes almost as wide a range of ages as the rest of GWI’s sample combined.

Top Takeaways

Looking for a guided tour of this quarter’s top stories? This video unpacks 10 essential takeaways from this quarter’s report in just 10 minutes:

The complete Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report

You’ll find this quarter’s main report in the embed below (click here if that’s not working for you), but read on past that to explore my in-depth analysis of what all these numbers actually mean for you and your work.

The global state of digital in July 2024

Let’s begin with the latest headlines for digital adoption and use around the world [please feel free to copy-paste this section into your own social media post – just remember to tag us!]:

The global population reached 8.12 billion as we began the second half of 2024, with that total figure increasing by 74 million (+0.9 percent) since July 2023. Urbanisation is also creeping up, with 57.9 percent of the world’s inhabitants now resident in towns and cities.
5.68 billion unique individuals were using mobile phones at the end of June 2024, meaning that 70 percent of the world’s population now qualifies as a mobile user. The size of this group continues to grow too, with the global total up by 126 million (+2.6 percent) since this time last year. Smartphones now account for more than 85 percent of the mobile handsets in use at a worldwide level, but 1 in 7 active handsets is still a feature phone.
Internet users have grown by 167 million (+3.2 percent) over the past 12 months, taking the worldwide total to 5.45 billion. These figures mean that 67.1 percent of the global population is now online, but a total of 2.67 billion people remained offline at the start of July 2024.
Kepios analysis shows that active social media user identities have grown by almost 6 percent over the past year, with the global total increasing by 282 million since July 2023. The latest data puts the global total at 5.17 billion, although it’s important to remember that this figure may not represent unique individuals.

Those numbers make for some impressive soundbites, but what do this quarter’s numbers tell us about how people’s digital behaviours are changing and evolving?

Let’s lift the lid on this quarter’s essential findings…

7 in 10 people now uses a mobile phone

The latest data from GSMA Intelligence indicates that 70 percent of the world’s total population now uses a mobile phone.

The organisation’s latest figures put unique mobile subscribers at 5.68 billion, with that figure up by 126 million (+2.3 percent) since this time last year.

However, it’s worth remembering that – at a worldwide level – most young children won’t have a phone of their own, so it’s likely that the mobile adoption rate amongst adults is considerably higher than this overall 70 percent figure suggests.

Mobile growth

More than a quarter of a billion people started using mobile phones over the past two years, but GSMA Intelligence’s data shows that growth is slowing.

However, this deceleration is a natural result of there being fewer and fewer people left to connect, and does not in any way imply reduced interest in mobile.

It’s also interesting to note that Ericsson offers a different perspective on mobile use to the one offered by GSMA Intelligence.

Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report data puts unique mobile subscribers at 6.55 billion, which suggests a global adoption rate of 80.7 percent – a full 10 percentage points higher than the rate indicated by GSMA Intelligence’s data.

However, Ericsson offers a lower figure for total global mobile connections.

GSMA Intelligence’s research points to a total of 8.8 billion connections, compared with Ericsson’s 8.6 billion.

For context, total connections invariably exceed unique subscriber numbers due to issues such as the same individual using more than one mobile handset or SIM (e.g. one for personal use, and another for business use).

The rise of smartphones

Ericsson’s data shows that smartphones account for more than 4 in 5 of the mobile handsets in use today, with the company’s June 2024 analysis putting smartphones’ share of connections at 82.4 percent.

The number of smartphones in use has increased threefold over the past decade, with Ericsson’s data pointing to 7.1 billion of these devices in use around the world today.

That compares with the 2.3 billion smartphones that the company says were in use back in 2014, when smartphones accounted for fewer than 1 in 3 mobile connections.

Smartphones have also become the world’s primary gateway to the internet, with data from GWI indicating that 93.7 percent of internet users now go online via a smart mobile handset.

However – despite smartphones’ apparent ubiquity – more than 1 billion feature phones are still in use around the world, accounting for 1 in 7 of current mobile connections.

Meanwhile, cellular data connections also power internet access for more than a quarter of a billion routers, tablets, and mobile PCs, with these devices accounting for roughly 3½ percent of global mobile connections.

Mobiles are our preferred digital device

Overall, GWI’s latest figures show that 95.9 percent of us use either a smartphone or a feature phone for at least some of our connected activities.

Within that group, just 1.1 percent of adult internet users access the internet solely via a feature phone.

This compares with an overall total of 4.5 percent of internet users who use feature phones for at least some of the internet activity [note that this figure includes the 1.1 percent who only use these devices].

This suggests that roughly 1 in 4 people who use feature phones to go online are wholly dependent on these devices for internet access, whereas the remaining three-quarters use a combination of devices.

Interestingly however, we see a similar dependence ratio amongst smartphone users, with 24.3 percent of internet users only going online via a smartphone, compared with a total of 93.7 percent who use a smartphone for at least some of their online activities.

All remaining users go online via a combination of devices, with the typical respondent in GWI’s survey saying that they use an average of 2.7 devices to access the internet.

At a worldwide level, 62.2 percent of internet users say that they go online via laptops and desktops, suggesting that there are roughly 50 percent more mobile internet users than there are “computer” internet users.

However, it’s worth noting that GWI’s survey only covers 53 of the world’s largest economies.

These countries are home to more than 80 percent of the world’s internet users, but trends in countries not covered by GWI’s research suggest that the device split may be even greater than the available data suggest.

For example, data from Statcounter suggests that – overall – mobiles now account for more than 60 percent of global web traffic.

However, mobiles are responsible for more than three-quarters of web page requests in a total of 59 countries, while mobiles are responsible for more than 90 percent of web traffic in Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Chad.

Mobiles claim greatest share of internet time

Data from GWI also shows that mobile phones account for the greatest share of the time that we spend online.

Overall, people spend roughly 57 percent of their “connected lives” using either a smartphone or a feature phone, compared with the 43 percent they spend using laptops, desktops, and tablets.

However – as is so often the case in digital behaviours – this “device balance” varies meaningfully by country.

At the top end of the spectrum, Thais use mobiles for close to two-thirds (64.4 percent) of their online time, with larger devices only responsible for 35.6 percent of connected activity.

Conversely, Japanese people are still more likely to prefer computers and tablets, with these devices claiming 56 percent of online time in Japan.

Computers still matter

So, despite the impressive rise of mobile phones over recent years, it’s important to highlight that computers still play an important role in our online lives.

Data from GWI indicates that more than 6 in 10 internet users still make use of laptops and desktops for at least some of their internet activity, with users in Europe particularly likely to say they use computers to go online.

However, computer use isn’t restricted to richer nations, and 4 in 5 internet users in South Africa (79.9 percent) say that they use these larger devices for at least some of their connected activities.

GWI’s new 65+ audience data also reveals that computers are particularly important for older internet users.

This may be partly due to legacy behaviours, especially because most of the people in this age group were older than 50 when the iPhone launched in 2007.

However, in addition to the influence of habit, it’s also possible that the benefits of larger screens and physical keyboards are particularly appealing to users who may be experiencing a decline in visual acuity and manual dexterity.

But for context, while people over the age of 65 continue to be largely invisible to the world’s advertisers (more on that later), it’s worth remembering that people over the age of 50 are responsible for more than half of all consumer spending in the United States.

So, much as mobile should certainly be a priority for web developers and marketers, it’s important to remember that the best approach is mobile first, not mobile only.

Continued growth in internet adoption

The latest data from a variety of reputable sources indicates that internet adoption has accelerated over the past 12 months, compared with the growth rates that we saw this time last year.

Kepios analysis of data from the ITU, GSMA Intelligence, Eurostat, and a variety of national regulatory authorities shows that the number of internet users grew by 3.2 percent between July 2023 and July 2025, compared with the 2.8 percent we saw between 2022 and 2023.

In absolute numbers, the global total grew by 167 million over the past year, compared with growth of 142 million for the previous 12 months.

This means that we’ve seen additional growth of 25 million users over the past year, which is all the more impressive when we consider that internet users are already a ‘supermajority’.

For perspective, global internet users have almost doubled over the past decade, from 2.76 billion in July 2014, to the 5.45 billion we see in our latest Global Digital Reports data.

Online news trends

Trends in the world’s news behaviours have implications for all of us, because they reveal valuable insights into how people discover, consume, and share online content.

But for marketers in particular, news trends offer essential insights into the value that audiences place on truth, facts, and other kinds of information – especially those that affect their personal wellbeing, prosperity, and liberty.

These insights also enable marketers to gauge the current “mood” of society, and to build an understanding of the broader contexts in which their activities and content will appear.

Moreover, news outlets remain a top choice for many of the world’s advertisers, so it’s critical to understand and track how audiences “feel” about these channels.

As a result, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ)’s Digital News Report has become an annual “must read”, and the latest edition is no exception.

As such, I’d strongly recommend exploring the full 2024 report over on the Reuters Institute’s website.

We’ve also pulled out some of the key findings though, and supplemented them with a wealth of additional data from the likes of GWI, Similarweb, data.ai, Google Trends, and more.

However, at more than 100 pages and with almost 12,500 words of analysis, the resulting content became too big to include within our July Statshot report, so we’ve split this content out into a dedicated, standalone report.

You can access all of that content – in full, and for free – over on DataReportal, but you’ll also find some of the key headlines below.

Essential digital news headlines

Perhaps the most important finding in this year’s data is that interest in news continues to decline, with fewer than half of adults surveyed in the RISJ research saying that they’re either “extremely” or “very” interested in news.

That figure has seen steep declines over recent years too, as we explore in detail in our full analysis.

Moreover, almost as many people say that they now try to avoid news, with roughly 4 in 10 people saying that they block news out at least some of the time.

Trust in news media remains worryingly low too, but it’s well worth exploring the trends in this data point over recent years to gain a broader perspective on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as this year’s wave of elections.

Meanwhile, social media is the primary online gateway through which people discover news in 2024, ahead of search engines and news outlets’ owned digital properties.

Facebook remains the top social platform for news, but data suggests that the share of internet users turning to the platform to look for news content has actually declined over recent years.

Conversely, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok all appear to be gaining momentum from a news perspective, but – despite its storied history with news – the trends for X are more complicated.

In addition to exploring people’s news behaviours, our full report also takes a closer look at the success of individual news brands across a variety of digital environments.

One of the most salient takeaways in this brand data is how audiences’ preferences and behaviours vary between websites and mobile apps.

However, the starkest differences surface in the data for brand success across social media platforms, with some particularly eye-opening findings in our latest Facebook data.

I also found the news trends for TikTok particularly interesting, given that nearly 1 in 4 young adults now say that they actively seek out news content on the platform.

That’s just a brief “appetiser” of what you’ll find in the full report and analysis though, so be sure to head over to DataReportal to explore all of the data in our complete Digital 2024 Global News Report (it’s free!).

Making sense of AI use

Some readers may be wondering why we haven’t included any slides on the use of AI in our reports (at least so far), but the simple answer to that question is that it’s still very difficult to find reliable, consistent, and comparable data for behavioural metrics.

However, given the increasingly important role that these tools play in people’s daily lives around the world, let’s take a look at what we do know.

Please note that the following data points do not appear within this quarter’s report, but please let me know if you think this data would make a valuable addition to our ongoing reports series.

ChatGPT is the most used “standalone” AI tool

One of the things that makes tracking public adoption of artificial intelligence so difficult is that many tools integrate AI into broader systems.

For example:

Google has begun to integrate Gemini into various Workplace apps like Gmail and Docs
Microsoft is rolling out integrations of Copilot into its Windows operating system
Adobe has already added generative AI functionality to various programs with its Creative Cloud suite

More importantly, there’s no easy way to quantify how many people actively use the AI components of these tools, so there’s currently no practical way to compare AI users in the ways that we might compare user numbers for social media platforms.

However, data points such as web traffic and mobile app use can offer us meaningful insights into how many people have adopted “standalone” AI-powered services.

And our analysis of this data suggests that ChatGPT is a clear leader.

Data from Similarweb indicates that chatgpt.com attracted more than 300 million unique monthly visitors in June 2024, with that figure increasing by close to 5 percent compared with May 2024.

Meanwhile, Similarweb’s (paid) tools report that total visits to ChatGPT’s website increased by 14 percent month on month, reaching almost 2.9 billion in June 2024.

And critically, these total traffic figures suggest that existing ChatGPT users are making more frequent use of the service, in addition to OpenAI attracting new users.

Semrush offers an even larger figure for the number of unique visitors to ChatGPT’s website, with the company’s latest data indicating 430 million uniques in June 2024.

However, Semrush and Similarweb are closely aligned on figures for total site traffic, with Semrush’s (paid) tools offering a rounded total of 3 billion visits for June 2024.

ChatGPT sees mobile success

Meanwhile, although not quite as impressive as those web traffic figures, intelligence from data.ai indicates that ChatGTP’s mobile app had more than 180 million monthly active users in June 2024.

That figure was up by close to 5 percent month on month too, pointing to roughly the same rate of growth that we saw in Similarweb’s unique visitor figures.

It’s reasonable to expect that there will be significant overlap between visitors to the platform’s website and users of its mobile app, but nonetheless, recent trends in the available data suggest that ChatGPT could well pass the half-billion active users mark sometime during 2025.

But ChatGPT’s success isn’t limited to its user numbers, and trends revealed by data.ai intelligence also show that people have been spending more money within the ChatGPT mobile app over recent months too.

Data shows that the app saw one of the 10 largest increases in in-app purchases between March and May 2024, with consumer revenues jumping by more than 50 percent with respect to the previous three-month period.

ChatGPT’s in-app earnings are still a long way off those of store leader TikTok, but the pace of recent growth points to the potential for AI to deliver meaningful consumer revenues, as well as via enterprise income.

Have “big players” fallen behind?

However, other services are yet to gain the same momentum as ChatGPT.

Similarweb’s data indicates that the closest standalone AI competitor is Google’s Gemini web interface, with gemini.google.com attracting close to 60 million unique visitors in June 2024.

However, Similarweb’s data also suggests that unique traffic to this domain was down by more than 10 percent month on month, while total visits fell even faster.

Gemini’s web interface still attracted more than 340 million total visits in June 2024 though, so it’s still a top choice.

Meanwhile, Similarweb’s data shows very similar trends for traffic to Microsoft’s Copilot web interface, with unique visitors to copilot.microsoft.com also down by more than 10 percent between May and June 2024.

However, with just 10 million unique visitors in June 2024, the Copilot web interface is still a long way behind the other two leaders.

Having said that, it’s critical to remember that both Google and Microsoft are integrating their AI tools and services into their broader offerings, and as such, visits to each tool’s standalone web interface are not the most representative metric of their adoption or success.

Returning our attention to “standalone” AI tools, Similarweb reports that Perplexity attracted more than 15 million unique visitors to its web domain in June 2024, although that figure was largely unchanged versus the previous month.

Trends for Antrhopic’s Claude were more encouraging though, with unique visitors to claude.ai up by almost 20 percent between May and June 2024.

However, Claude’s monthly unique visitor numbers still haven’t broken the 12 million mark at the time of writing, even if the company has seen impressive user growth over the past six months.

The outlook for AI

But despite some impressive numbers – especially when it comes to user growth – it’s important to put current AI adoption rates into perspective.

For example, ChatGPT’s web tool still has significantly fewer unique monthly visitors than Yahoo!’s primary dot-com domain.

Current trends suggest that the OpenAI site will probably catch up with Yahoo! in terms of unique visitors sometime in 2025, but the current gap illustrates – once again – that people’s everyday digital behaviours are often markedly different to the misinformation we see in hyperbolic headlines.

Yes, AI will probably change the world (hopefully for the better), and yes, some people will become very rich thanks to their work in AI.

However, it may be another few years before the average person integrates overt “AI behaviours” into their daily digital routines.

As such, while it’s imperative that you and your business plan for the future, you must also ensure that today’s practices align with people’s current behaviours and preferences.

Has TikTok overtaken Instagram?

And talking of current behaviours, let’s turn our attention to social media.

First up, one of our most important data points suggests that TikTok’s ad reach may already have overtaken that of its arch-rival, Instagram.

For context, Bytedance’s ad tools only report potential ad reach for audiences aged 18 and above, whereas Meta’s ad tools still report ad reach for audiences aged 13 and above.

As a result, the “total” Instagram ad figure reported in Meta’s tools is still greater than the total TikTok figure reported in Bytedance’s ad tools.

However, if we compare figures on a like-for-like basis, a different story emerges.

The platforms’ own tools indicate that TikTok ads now reach 1.604 billion adults aged 18 and above, while Instagram ads reach 1.601 billion users in the same cohort.

In other words, the companies’ own data indicates that TikTok ads now reach 3 million more adult users than Instagram ads do.

At this point, it’s worth clarifying that the ad reach figures we report for TikTok do not include Douyin users in China, so – at least in theory – the adult reach figures we report for both Instagram and TikTok should be directly comparable.

Moreover, data suggests that TikTok’s global audience skews younger than Instagram’s, so there’s every chance that – if TikTok were to report data for users aged 13 to 18 – the platform’s overall ad reach might exceed that of Instagram too.

Meanwhile, comparing growth trends in reported figures adds yet another dimension to this story.

On the one hand, TikTok’s ad reach total has increased by 22 million over the past 90 days, resulting in quarter-on-quarter growth of 1.4 percent.

However, Instagram has lost roughly one million users from its reach figure for users aged 18+ during the same period, and while that only equates to a quarter-on-quarter decline of 0.07 percent, these figures still suggest that Instagram’s reach is heading in the wrong direction.

But does this mean TikTok now has more users than Instagram?

Let’s see how these latest ad reach figures compare with active user data from trusted third parties.

Alternative facts

Determining exactly how many people use a given social platform is notoriously difficult, which is why we like to provide as many perspectives as possible within our Global Digital Reports.

The platforms’ own data is a particularly important starting point – not least because these figures focus on monetisable ad reach – but data from other reputable sources can help us build a more informed picture of broader platform use.

First up, survey data from GWI indicates that adult internet users outside of China are still considerably more likely to say that they use Instagram than TikTok.

We’re unable to publish exact figures here, but GWI’s latest wave of research indicates that Instagram may have more than 1.5 times as many active users aged 16 and above as TikTok does.

Moreover, GWI’s respondents are more than twice as likely to choose Instagram as their “favourite” platform as they are to choose TikTok.

It’s important to note that these figures are based on 52 of the world’s top economies, and we’ve removed China from the GWI dataset, because we treat TikTok and Douyin as two separate platforms (just as ByteDance does in its own reporting).

However, the countries in GWI’s survey account for more than 80 percent of the world’s internet users, so – even if we allow for coverage gaps – GWI’s data suggests that Instagram still has a clear lead over TikTok.

App-arrent differences

But it’s not just GWI’s data that puts Instagram ahead of TikTok, and the latest intelligence from data.ai tells a remarkably similar story.

Once again, we’re unable to share exact figures here, but – outside of China – the number of people using Instagram’s mobile app between March and May 2024 was roughly 1.5 times greater than the equivalent number of users for TikTok.

However, it’s worth noting that – despite having meaningfully fewer users – TikTok now accounts for a greater share of overall social media time than Instagram does.

The latest data.ai research shows that the cumulative time the world spent using TikTok’s Android app between March and May was actually 9 percent greater than the cumulative time that Instagram users spent using the platform’s Android app during the same period.

The typical TikTok user session also lasts twice as long as the typical Instagram session, although Instagram enjoys an average of 12 percent more monthly sessions per user than TikTok does.

Making sense of the numbers

So, where do these numbers leave us?

Well, for me, the data suggests that Instagram still enjoys a comfortable lead over TikTok.

The companies’ own ad reach data is critically important, but remember that both Meta and ByteDance report reach in terms of active accounts, not active individuals.

Conversely, GWI’s data reflects the reported behaviour of unique individuals, and data.ai’s figures are based on smartphone handset activity, rather than platform account-level activity.

As such, this third-party data is perhaps less likely to include “non-human” account activity, whereas the companies themselves acknowledge that their user figures may include distortions due to issues such as “duplicate and fake accounts”.

The strategic solution

But perhaps the most important takeaway is that marketers don’t need to worry about which platform is “bigger”.

All the data I see suggests that both Instagram and TikTok have well in excess of 1 billion human users each month, and both platforms are therefore hugely valuable opportunities for marketers.

So, if you’re considering either one of these options, my advice would be to try using both, and see which delivers the best outcomes for your needs.

However, remember that you’ll see significant audience duplication across these two platforms.

Indeed, GWI’s latest data shows that – outside of China – more than half of all Instagram users also use TikTok, while roughly 80 percent of TikTok users also use Instagram.

Meanwhile, if we remove the influence of India – where TikTok is still blocked – we see even greater overlaps, with roughly two-thirds of Instagram users also using TikTok, and roughly 4 in 5 TikTok users also using Instagram.

So, if you intend to keep using both Instagram and TikTok over the longer term, you’ll want to adopt different approaches for each platform, in order to avoid message saturation and audience fatigue.

Roblox time exceeds some top social apps

Around the world, the total time that people spend using the Roblox mobile app exceeds the total time that people spend using some of the world’s top social media apps, including Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, X (Twitter), and Telegram.

Intelligence from data.ai – now part of Sensor Tower – reveals that the world spent a combined average of almost a quarter of a trillion hours each month using the Roblox mobile app between March and May, which ranked it ninth in the world by total user time across all mobile apps and games.

It may not come as a surprise that Roblox also tops data.ai’s ranking of mobile games by monthly active users, but this same data points does offer some surprises when we compare Roblox use to apps outside of the gaming category.

For example, global data for the period from 1st March to 31st May indicate that Roblox’s mobile app had more monthly active users than the apps of LinkedIn, Shein, and Uber.

Data also shows that the typical Roblox user opens the app more than once every three days, so if you’re still not convinced of the power – and potential – of video games, now might be a good time to reevaluate that position.

Ecommerce competition heats up

We’ve seen a flurry of activity in the ecommerce industry over recent weeks, as some of the top names in online shopping jockey for position.

Amazon’s mobile app still attracts the largest active user base in data.ai’s shopping categories, followed by Shopee in second, and Flipkart in third.

However, much of the recent “action” has focused on the apps that occupy the next two places in the ranking.

Shein currently places fourth at a worldwide level by monthly active users, while Temu claims fifth spot.

But new intelligence from data.ai indicates that Temu saw the biggest increase in MAUs between March and May 2024, adding even more active users than social media juggernaut TikTok.

Shein still has a greater number of monthly active users than Temu though, with data.ai putting the fashion-centric app’s active user base meaningfully ahead of PDD Holdings’ upstart competitor.

However, Temu attracted significantly more new downloads of its app than Shein did during the March to May period, suggesting that the gap between the two apps is narrowing.

And just to add to the tension, reports have begun to circulate about a potential new “discount” app from Amazon, which some commentators suggest may be specifically designed to compete directly with Shein and Temu.

Social media ad spend grows

The latest quarterly insights from Skai show that global spend on social media advertising continues to grow.

The company’s analysis indicates that the total amount spent on paid social media placements increased by 13 percent in the twelve months to June 2024, while quarter-on-quarter growth between March and June came in at just below 1 percent.

For comparison, Skai reports that global search ad spend was up by 6 percent over the past 12 months.

However, because many social media ad placements are still sold via auction, the primary impact of increased spend has been a meaningful rise in average social media CPMs.

Indeed, despite that 13 percent annual increase in investment, the number of social media ad impressions served only increased by 4 percent during the same period.

Meanwhile, the price of 1,000 social media ad impressions grew by 8.4 percent over the same period, to reach a worldwide average of USD $4.40 over the three months from April to June.

CPMs saw meaningful quarterly growth too, with Skai’s data pointing to an average increase of 6 percent over the past 90 days.

People don’t feel seen

Social media click-through rates (CTR) rebounded in Q2 after a meaningful dip during the first three months of the year, but with Skai’s data putting the current rate at just 0.66 percent, fewer than 1 in every 150 ads results in a click.

Admittedly, not all social media ads require a click-through in order to deliver their intended outcome, especially as industry rhetoric emphasises a balance between “brand” and “performance” activities.

However, for marketers hoping to improve click-through rates, it might be worth considering the findings of GWI’s latest research.

At a worldwide level, just 15.3 percent of adult internet users say that they feel “represented” in advertising, with that figure falling as low as 3 percent in Japan.

Older people feel particularly excluded, with barely 3.8 percent of respondents aged 65+ in a selection of GWI’s markets saying that they feel the advertising they see and hear represents them as an individual.

It’s also interesting to note that – overall – women are less likely to recognise themselves in the ads that they’re served.

GWI’s latest research suggests that just 14.9 percent of women feel a sense of personal affinity for the ads that reach them, compared with an average of 15.8 percent for men.

For perspective, on a relative basis, that means men are roughly 6 percent more likely to feel represented in the ads that they see and hear.

However, levels of affinity are drastically lower amongst people of non-binary gender, with GWI research finding that – across a subset of countries – just 5.3 percent of this demographic feel represented in the advertising that they see.

The consequences of inconsequentiality

Considering that businesses around the world spent in excess of USD $1 trillion on advertising in 2023 alone, these findings are a damning indictment of industry performance.

Sure, advertising still works, but with so few people in our audiences – barely 1 in 7 of them – saying that they identify with the ads that they see and hear, this report card delivers a resounding message: “must try harder”.

However, it’s important to remember that the primary problem here is not adverts that upset or offend people, nor is it ads that people dislike or find annoying.

Rather, it’s that most people find the vast majority of advertising wholly irrelevant to their needs and interests – and hence to their lives.

Contrary to the hand-wringing you’ll see in the industry press and in sanctimonious LinkedIn posts, the biggest problems aren’t caused by advertising that elicits negative thoughts or emotions; they’re caused by advertising that elicits nothing at all.

For perspective, consider this: you may remember a handful of the ads that you’ve seen over the past 24 hours, and there’s a chance you may even remember some of those ads specifically because they annoyed you.

However, the more important thing to consider is that you’ve likely forgotten the vast majority of the ads that you saw, because most of those ads were totally irrelevant to your life.

They were inconsequential.

And in a business that’s all about changing the ways people think, feel, and behave, that’s perhaps the worst of all outcomes.

As Elie Wiesel asserted, “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.”

TikTok tops the tips

The latest figures from data.ai show that TikTok (including Douyin) earned the greatest share of app store revenues between March and May 2024, with worldwide users spending an average of more than USD $340 million each month over the latest three-month period.

In other words, TikTok and Douyin now generate more than USD $1 billion per quarter from their users’ in-app purchases alone.

And critically, this figure only represents consumer spend via app stores – it does not include any revenues that ByteDance earns by showing ads on these platforms, nor does it include any ecommerce revenues generated via TikTok Shop.

The majority of this in-app spend can be attributed to the purchase of TikTok “coins”, which fans can use to send in-app virtual gifts to their favourite creators, much like they might tip a busker on a physical-world street.

Creators can subsequently redeem these gifts for “real” money (i.e. fiat currencies), but Bytedance keeps half of the original purchase value.

TechCrunch reports that TikTok’s most popular in-app purchase is a USD $19.99 pack of 1,321 coins, with this particular option responsible for roughly a quarter of the app’s consumer spend.

TikTok isn’t the only social app generating money from in-app purchases though; YouTube generates more than half a billion dollars per month in consumer app-store spend too, while LinkedIn also appears in the top ten apps by store revenue, thanks to in-app sales of its “pro” subscription plans.

Snapchat’s ad reach jumps

Data published in Snap’s advertising resources shows that the global reach of Snap ads has grown considerably over the past three months.

The company’s own figures indicate that marketers can now reach more than 710 million users with ads on Snapchat each month, which is 35 million more (+5.2 percent) than the figure the company reported at the start of last quarter.

This marks a meaningful turnaround for Snapchat, which had seen ad reach remain relatively stable in the period between July 2023 and April 2024.

And in something of a meaningful milestone, our analysis of the company’s own data indicates that – at a worldwide level – Snapchat ads now reach 1 in 10 adults aged 18 and above.

Greece saw the fastest increase in reported audience figures, with the company’s own data suggesting that Snapchat’s ad reach more than doubled in the country over the past 90 days.

Croatia also saw strong growth (+73 percent), while Spain and Algeria both saw reported reach increase by more than 25 percent during the same period.

Meanwhile, India saw the greatest absolute audience growth over the past quarter, with Snap’s tools pointing to an additional 12 million users across the country during Q2.

Pinterest pushes up

And Pinterest has had a good quarter too.

Figures published in the company’s Q1 investor earnings announcement showed that monthly active users increased by 20 million during the first three months of 2024, resulting in quarter-on-quarter growth of 4 percent.

This figure continues a streak of growth for the world’s favourite online pinboard, which will be a welcome change for the company’s investors following the stagnation we saw during 2022.

Meanwhile, the company’s own ad reach data points to continued success during the second quarter of 2024 too, with potential reach figures increasing by close to 5 million users (+1.5 percent) between the start of April and the start of July.

The company now reports that marketers can reach more than 320 million users with ads, but its self-serve buying tools continue to offer only a small selection of countries, so the true potential reach figure may be considerably higher than these figures suggest.

Similar to Snapchat, Greece saw the fastest increase in reported Pinterest ad reach over the past 90 days, with figures in the company’s own tools pointing to a jump of 12.8 percent.

Meanwhile, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark also saw quarter-on-quarter growth in excess of 5 percent.

Reported Reddit reach surges after IPO

And it’s been a good three months for Reddit’s ads team too, with the company’s own tools indicating that worldwide reach increased by 7 percent over the past 90 days.

The company’s self-service ad buying tools point to a worldwide increase of 16 million users between April and July 2024, pushing the latest global total to almost a quarter of a billion.

Reddit’s audience still skews heavily male though, and data from GWI indicates that more than 6 in 10 active Reddit users are male.

X reach declining

But it hasn’t been such a good quarter for Elon Musk and team, with figures reported in X’s advertising tools suggesting that global ad reach has fallen steadily over recent months.

The platform formerly known as Twitter saw reported reach dip by more than 4 percent over the past 90 days, and the latest total of 586 million is roughly 12 percent lower than the high of 666 million that the platform’s own tools reported back in October 2023.

However, X has still seen its reported reach grow over the past twelve months, with the current total 21.6 million higher than the 564 million we saw this time last year.

X’s reported reach figures suffered from wild swings during most of 2023 though, so – despite coming directly from the company’s own tools – that July 2023 figure may be less reliable.

VR still niche

Despite its enduring popularity amongst tech journalists, virtual reality (VR) still hasn’t taken off amongst the masses.

The number of people who claim to own VR devices has varied over time, but GWI’s latest figure of 4.6 percent is almost the same as the 4.4 percent figure the company reported seven years ago, back at the start of 2017.

Moreover, the latest figures suggest that people are more likely to own a feature phone than they are to own a VR headset.

VR adoption appears to have peaked in 2022, when ownership figures reached as high as 5.6 percent of GWI’s global survey base.

However, the worldwide figure has declined by a full percentage point since then, and while the addition of audiences aged 65+ in GWI’s latest research will have accelerated the reduction that we saw in the most recent quarter, ownership had already fallen to 4.7 percent in GWI’s previous round of data, before these audience changes affected the average.

There is a chance that devices like Apple’s Vision Pro headset may reignite momentum, but with Bloomberg reporting “slow” sales of the US$3,500 “mixed reality” device, it seems unlikely that we’ll see VR adoption go mainstream anytime soon.

WhatsApp business gaining importance

New analysis from data.ai reveals that WhatsApp Business has seen meaningful growth in the amount of time that businesses spend using the app over recent months.

The service-oriented app saw the sixth-largest increase in total app time between March and May 2024, while the app also saw monthly active users increase by more than 5 percent compared with the previous three months.

This follows a statement on a recent Meta investor earnings call in which Susan Li – the company’s CFO – stated that the hefty 85 percent growth in Meta’s “Family of Apps other revenue” was driven primarily by business messaging revenue in the WhatsApp Business Platform.

Wrapping up

That’s all for our Digital 2024 July Global Statshot Report, but don’t forget that our Digital 2024 Global News Report is already available to read in full over on DataReportal.

You can also find all of our local country data in our comprehensive online library.

I’ll be back on your screens in a few weeks to bring you essential insights from our upcoming October Statshot Report, when I’ll also look ahead to some of the trends I expect to shape digital success in 2025 and beyond.

In the meantime, let’s connect on LinkedIn, where I share even more nerdy updates.

About the author

Simon Kemp

Simon is DataReportal’s chief analyst, and CEO of Kepios.
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