Digital 2025: top social platforms in 2025
It’s one of the most common questions that the team at DataReportal hear from marketers: “what’s the top social media platform?”
Well, interestingly, there’s more than one answer to that question in 2025, because different metrics offer different – and equally valuable – answers.
Social media platforms also adopt different metrics and varying levels of “secrecy” when it comes to active user numbers, so we can’t reliably compare the companies’ own numbers.
However, the good news is that we’ve gone deep into the data to explore what’s really going on in social media.
So, get comfortable with your beverage of choice, and and we’ll take you on a tour of all the latest trends and insights.
Top social platform by active users
Our analysis of data from various third-party sources indicates that YouTube is the most used social media platform at the start of 2025.
For starters, with arch-rival Meta’s tools indicating that 99.3 percent of its users access Meta’s platforms via mobile devices, it’s safe to assume that social media app use figures are highly representative of overall platform use.
And with that in mind, it’s worth exploring data.ai’s latest proprietary figures for social media app use.
Based on Android activity in November 2024, data.ai’s intelligence suggests that YouTube’s active user base is roughly 16 percent larger than that of its next nearest rival, WhatsApp.
For reference, Apple’s privacy restrictions mean that it’s significantly more difficult to track iPhone behaviours – even when users actively want to participate in research – which is why this data only includes Android activity.
However, for reassurance, data from Statcounter indicates that Android powers close to three-quarters (73.5 percent) of all the smartphones in use today, so data for Android handsets is representative of the vast majority of the world’s social media users.
Do note that this ranking does not include data for China though, due to the country’s unique app store system.
Returning to the data, Facebook ranks third, with data.ai’s latest intelligence suggesting that the platform’s user base is roughly 82.2 percent the size of YouTube’s.
Instagram ranks fourth, with an active user index of 72.3, while TikTok rounds out the top five.
However, with an index of just 48.3, data.ai’s figures indicate that TikTok’s active user base was still less than half the size of YouTube’s in November 2024.
The world’s favourite social platform
GWI classes YouTube as a video platform – not a social media platform – so, unfortunately, we’re currently unable to compare its “popularity” against platforms like Facebook and TikTok.
However, on the plus side, this dataset does include insights for China.
And amongst the options included in this question in GWI’s survey, Instagram comes out top, with 16.6 percent of adult social media users identifying it as their favourite social platform.
WhatsApp ranks second at a worldwide level with 16 percent, while Facebook ranks third, with 13.1 percent.
WeChat places fourth with 12 percent, although it’s worth stressing that this is almost entirely due to the platform’s popularity in its home country of China.
Indeed, GWI’s data suggests that barely 1 in 500 social media users outside of China (0.2 percent) identify WeChat as their favourite platform.
And TikTok rounds out the top five here too, with 8.1 percent of the world’s adults identifying ByteDance’s short video service as their favourite social platform.
But for added perspective, it may be interesting to learn that 3.2 percent of adult users still identify X as their favourite social media platform.
And furthermore, despite wild headlines about a purported decline in the popularity of the platform formerly known as Twitter, GWI’s data suggests that X’s appeal has held relatively steady over the past couple of years.
Indeed, the 3.2 percent figure in this year’s data is the same as the proportion of adult social media users who identified X as their favourite social media platform this time last year, and it’s only 0.2 percentage points below the 3.4 percent figure that we reported in our Digital 2023 Global Overview Report.
It’s also interesting to see how social media preferences vary by age and gender.
At a worldwide level, women aged 16 to 44 prefer Instagram, while women over the age of 45 prefer WhatsApp.
These two platforms claim the top spots amongst men too, although WhatsApp takes the lead starting from age 35.
TikTok is the second choice for women aged 16 to 24, but by the age of 35, it slips down to sixth place in the rankings.
However, men are significantly less likely to identify TikTok as their favourite social media platform, and even by the time they reach 25, men are already more likely to prefer Facebook over TikTok.
And the clear takeaway here is to do your due diligence: it’s easy to get swept away by industry hyperbole and media click-bait, but the data tell a much more reliable story about what your audiences are really doing online.
Largest social media advertising audiences
Next up, the data published in the respective platforms’ ad planning tools indicate that YouTube also has the world’s largest social media advertising audience, with the company’s latest data pointing to total potential reach of more than 2.53 billion.
That means YouTube’s audience is roughly 11 percent larger than that of its next nearest rival, Facebook, with Meta’s planning tools indicating global Facebook ad reach of 2.28 billion at the start of 2025.
However, if we focus on audiences over the age of 18, Facebook comes out just ahead of YouTube, but with a difference of just 20 million, the gap is relatively small.
Meanwhile, Instagram comes out ahead of TikTok in the latest adult reach data, with Meta’s tools reporting potential reach of 1.67 billion Instagram users over the age of 18, compared with ByteDance’s reported figure of 1.59 billion for TikTok.
There’s a bit more to the rivalry between these two platforms though, so we’ll come back to these numbers a little later.
Top social platform by time spent
Our complete Digital 2025 Global Overview Report offers various other metrics for comparing social media platforms, but for the purposes of this analysis, we’ll finish up with a look at the total time spent “on platform”.
This data is again informed by intelligence from Sensor Tower’s data.ai, and it shows that YouTube takes the lion’s share of the world’s social media time.
Indeed, the world spends almost twice as much time using YouTube as it spends using the platform’s next nearest rival, TikTok.
WhatsApp and Facebook rank third and fourth, respectively, with both platforms capturing roughly the same amount of total user time each month.
And Instagram places fifth, although the platform’s total monthly user time is barely 42.5 percent that of top-ranked YouTube.
Platforms are not mutually exclusive
That rich collection of data should already help you to make sense of which platforms dominate today’s social landscape.
However, there’s another dataset that’s well worth considering when you’re exploring the role of different platforms, and that’s the extent to which their audiences overlap.
And the key takeaway here is that you can reach almost all of the users of any given social platform on at least one other platform.
Indeed, data suggest that barely 1.1 percent of YouTube’s users are unique to the platform, despite it being the world’s largest platform by active users.
Meanwhile, you can reach 99.3 percent of Facebook users on other platforms, and that figure rises to 99.9 percent for TikTok, Snapchat, X, and Telegram.
So, while it’s easy to get swept along by headlines proclaiming stratospheric platform growth and the excitement surrounding “shiny new platforms”, it’s worth remembering that you’ll almost always be able to reach all of these users on various other platforms.
New social platforms
But while we’re on the subject of “shiny new platforms”, let’s take a look at some of the names that have been making headlines over recent months.
Threads
First up, Meta’s newest platform – Threads – has seen remarkable user growth over recent weeks.
In late January 2025, Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed that Threads had 320 million monthly active users, of which more than 100 million are active each day.
This latest figure comes just a few weeks after Mosseri reported that the platform had passed the 300 million monthly active user mark, and just 2 months after he announced the platform had reached 275 million MAUs.
And these figures are corroborated by third-party intelligence from data.ai too, which shows similar active user figures for the platform’s mobile app.
Moreover, data.ai reports that Threads topped the active user growth rankings for the period between September and November 2024, meaning that the platform added more new users than any other app during that period.
Threads also ranked second in terms of the increase in its app downloads during that period, with only ChatGPT generating more incremental app downloads over those three months.
Meanwhile, Threads actually ranked fifth overall in terms of absolute download numbers during that same period (as opposed to incremental growth), putting it just behind Facebook.
These figures are already testament to the platform’s growing popularity, but such strong download figures also bode well for its future.
Stitching time
However, as we reported in our Digital 2024 October Global Statshot Report, Threads is still struggling to turn activity into a “habit”.
For example, data.ai’s figures suggest that barely 1 in 4 of the platform’s active users logged in on a daily basis between September and November 2024.
Moreover, people still aren’t spending much time on Threads, and data.ai intelligence indicates that the typical Threads user only spent 39 minutes per month using the platform’s Android app in November.
That’s 25 times less than Instagram users spent using the Instagram app on Android devices, and 7.6 times less than X users spent using X’s Android app during the same period.
However, data.ai reports that the typical Threads session now lasts 1 minute and 40 seconds, which is longer than the average Snapchat session.
So, if Threads can improve its usage frequency, it may well become a force to be reckoned with in the months ahead.
Bluesky
Bluesky Social has enjoyed something of a moment in the sun in recent weeks, with the media reporting that “swathes” of exasperated X users have been turning to the platform for refuge.
However, the data points to more of a trickle than a deluge.
At the time of writing, data indicates that the platform has attracted more than 30 million registered users, but data.ai reported that the app still had fewer than 25 million monthly active users at the end of November 2024.
Having said that, data.ai’s intelligence reveals that Bluesky Social was the fourth-fastest growing app in terms of incremental downloads between September and November last year.
But despite these promising trends, Bluesky appears to be facing similar challenges to those faced by Threads when it comes to turning interest into regular action.
For example, data.ai’s figures show that barely 1 in 5 active users opened the Bluesky app each day between September and November, which is less than half the daily open rate enjoyed by X.
However, the typical Bluesky user opens the platform’s Android app a greater number of times each month than the typical active Threads user opens the Threads Android app, so there’s still some promise in Bluesky’s numbers.
Current growth rates suggest that the platform still has a long way to go before it becomes a “big hitter” in the social media landscape though, so – at least from a marketer’s perspective – it may make more sense to park Bluesky in the “wait and see” bracket for now.
And the rest…
Given recent media excitement surrounding TikTok’s potential ban in the United States – and the apps that might replace it – you’ve doubtless got a few more names on your radar: Lemon8, RedNote / Xiaohongshu, Likee… the list probably goes on.
However, all the data I’ve seen suggests that each of these platforms is still relatively small (<25 million MAU), at least outside of China, where Xiaohongshu has been popular for some time.
But more importantly, as marketers, we really need to ask ourselves why we spend so much time obsessing over the “next big thing”.
For perspective, we already have six platforms that reach more than 1 billion active users each month, and a total of 15 platforms that reach at least 500 million people.
Moreover, you can already reach 99 percent of the users of any of these platforms on at least one other platform.
And it is very, very unlikely that someone will join the internet for the first time today, and go on to download one of these new social apps as their first and only choice.
Indeed, realistically, we can expect almost every new social media user to start their journey with at least one of the more established platforms.
That’s not to say that smaller platforms don’t offer valuable opportunities of course, nor that these newer platforms won’t one day grow to rival today’s leaders.
However, given that you can already reach each of those platforms’ users on other channels, those opportunities have very little to do with potential reach.
So, my advice for marketers in 2025 is to stop worrying about every new platform that makes the headlines.
Rest assured that you can already reach all of the users of those new platforms on existing, more established platforms.
And moreover, I’d wager that you’re struggling to take full advantage of those existing opportunities anyway.
Just as buying a new guitar won’t make me a better musician unless I put in the necessary practice, so jumping onto a “shiny new platform” won’t help you achieve your marketing objectives unless you’re already close to achieving them on existing platforms.
In other words, only when you’ve completely exhausted all of the opportunities on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok do you need to start worrying about that shiny new platform you heard about in the media.
And if you should happen to find yourself in that unlikely position, please do get in touch – I’d love to know your secret.
But on that note, let’s turn our attention to those more “established” platforms.
YouTube trends in 2025
Compared with other social platforms, Alphabet appears to take a relatively conservative approach to reporting ad reach figures for YouTube.
Indeed, the company has only updated its audience figures twice over the past year, although the latest numbers still show that YouTube’s reach continues to grow.
Across the 88 countries for which Google’s tools publish reach numbers for YouTube, the company’s latest data show that YouTube ads now reach at least 2.53 billion users each month.
That figure is up by 40 million (+1.6 percent) compared with this time last year, but at the time of report production, YouTube hadn’t updated these numbers since October, so the quarter-on-quarter figures appear unchanged.
As we saw earlier in this analysis though, YouTube is likely the world’s most used social platform at the start of 2025, with reach across those 88 countries alone equal to more than 30 percent of the world’s population.
And for added perspective, YouTube ads now reach close to 4 in 10 of the world’s adults each month, and more than 45 percent of the world’s internet users.
Reflecting the demographic balance of the internet as a whole, YouTube’s audience skews male, with men aged 25 to 34 accounting for the single greatest share of overall platform reach.
However, it’s interesting to note that YouTube reaches more women than men amongst audiences aged 65 and above.
On a geographic level, India is home to YouTube’s largest country audience, with reported reach in the country rapidly approaching half a billion.
However, on a relative reach basis, figures suggest that YouTube is most popular in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Singapore.
You’ll also find details of YouTube’s top creators and content within our complete Digital 2025 Global Overview Report, which reveal some truly remarkable numbers.
In particular, for anyone without young children, you may be surprised to learn that Baby Shark Dance racked up an incremental 1.5 billion views – and 2 million additional likes – over the past 12 months alone.
Who knew, do do do doo…?
The state of Facebook in 2025
The available data indicate that Facebook remains the world’s second most used social media platform at the start of 2025, once again confounding that enduring myth that Facebook may be “dying”.
For example, third-party intelligence from Sensor Tower’s data.ai suggests that the platform still attracts 2.3 billion users to its mobile app each month.
Moreover, GWI’s research shows that Facebook is still the world’s third-favourite social platform, ranking well ahead of TikTok (although remember that this particular GWI dataset doesn’t include YouTube).
And Meta’s own data suggests that Facebook ads still reach more than 2¼ billion adults each month, with that figure up by 93 million (+4.3 percent) over the past 12 months.
So, no: Facebook most certainly isn’t dead.
Facebook trends to watch in 2025
However, there are some signs of cracks in Facebook’s success.
Indeed, data.ai’s figures show a very slight decline in active Facebook users between August and November
Similarly, the average, total amount of time that people spent using the Facebook Android app in November 2024 was almost 1½ hours less than the average, total amount of time that users spent using the app in August 2024.
And moreover, the average number of monthly sessions also fell during that period, from 304.5 in August 2024, to 280.2 in November 2024.
Facebook’s share of social referrals declines
Meanwhile, Facebook’s share of referrals to third-party websites fell to its lowest recorded level in September 2024, with Meta’s biggest platform responsible for fewer than 6 in 10 social media referrals at a worldwide level over the course of that month.
Referral traffic rebounded slightly between September and December 2024, but – at just 64 percent – the latest levels are still amongst the lowest we’ve seen in Statcounter’s data.
Facebook’s share of social referrals varies meaningfully by country though, with Statcounter’s data suggesting that Meta’s top platform accounts for more than 90 percent of referrals across the Balkans.
However, despite remaining the country’s most widely used social platform, Facebook accounts for a meagre 13.88 percent of social media referrals in Thailand.
And Facebook’s share of referrals is also surprisingly low in Hong Kong, despite the platform continuing to enjoy high levels of active use amongst the territory’s residents.
Facebook engagement tumbles
We’ve also seen meaningful declines in Facebook engagement rates over the past year, with figures from both SocialInsider and Locowise showing distinctly negative gradients over recent months.
And what’s more, trends suggest that marketers should expect to see the performance of their Facebook content continue to decline in 2025 too.
Sadly, the concept of “organic” reach is nothing more than a memory for most marketers, so comparisons with Page followers can often be disheartening.
However, even when we focus on performance by actual post reach, SocialInsider’s data indicates that marketers should expect an average engagement rate of below 2 percent.
Facebook ads still reaching up
But despite these trends, the Facebook ad reach figure published in Meta’s planning tools at the start of 2025 was the second highest we’ve ever seen (the highest was in October 2023).
And Meta’s platforms are clearly still top choices with advertisers too, with the company reporting record “family average revenue per person” in its 2024 Q4 earnings announcement at the end of January 2025.
So, while Zuck and team will want to improve those user and activity numbers in the months ahead, marketers should still consider Facebook to be one of the top opportunities in 2025.
Instagram outpaces TikTok
And there’s better news for Zuck and team in the latest Instagram data, too.
Perhaps most importantly, after the drama that we saw in last quarter’s numbers, Instagram has recaptured third place from TikTok in the global social media ad reach rankings.
Indeed, Instagram’s reported reach has grown by more than 5 percent over the past year, which is well ahead of the net 2 percent annual growth that we’ve seen in TikTok’s reported ad audience numbers during the same period.
Relatively speaking, Instagram has enjoyed particularly strong growth across Central Asia over the past year, with Uzbekistan seeing reported Instagram reach jump by a third, which equates to an additional 3 million users.
However, Instagram continues to see strong performance in its largest markets too.
And in fact, despite its top 5 markets already accounting for more than half of the platform’s total audience, Instagram still registered meaningful growth across India, the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey during the past three months.
However, marketers will want to keep their eye on Instagram engagement in 2025, with both Locowise and SocialInsider recording significant declines in Business account engagement rates over the past 12 months.
Both companies point to current Instagram engagement rates being less than half the values that we saw this time last year, which may have important implications for marketing performance.
And for context, these datasets indicate that Instagram engagement is falling even faster than Facebook engagement.
So, while engagement isn’t necessarily the most insightful metric for measuring the performance of social media marketing activities, marketers should still take extra time over the coming months to review whether their Instagram campaigns are delivering against objectives.
Having said that, Instagram remains a top choice for marketers in 2025, so these reviews should focus on improving is efficiency and effectiveness.
TikTok trends for 2025
But as we alluded to above, it’s been an interesting few months for TikTok.
Following a partial implementation of a government ban in the USA, the platform narrowly escaped going “totally dark” in the country in January 2025, and – at the time of writing – existing users in America can still use the platform if they already have it installed on their phones.
However, both Apple and Google have removed TikTok from their app stores in the United States, meaning that Americans are not currently able to download the app onto new devices, nor are they able to replace it on their current device if they’ve deleted it.
TikTok ad reach declines
But even before that US TikTok ban went into effect, the platform had already made some significant changes to its reported ad reach figures.
Indeed, the global potential reach figure delivered by Bytedance’s ad planning tools points to a drop of almost 100 million accounts between October 2024 and January 2025, resulting in a quarter-on-quarter decline of 5.7 percent.
The company’s own figures still allude to 2 percent year-on-year growth in global ad reach, but these recent corrections mean that TikTok’s ad reach now equates to less than 20 percent of the global population.
Our analysis of the data indicates that the biggest drops have affected countries across South-East Asia, with Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia all seeing a drop of more than 30 percent, and Vietnam’s reported total falling by more than 40 percent
In total, since October, the platform has lost almost 115 million accounts from its reported ad reach total in these four countries alone.
Additionally, the platform also saw meaningful drops in Brazil – where it lost nearly 20 million accounts – as well as in France and Australia.
However, the platform recorded some impressive gains in certain countries over the past three months, which helped to partially offset the overall impact of these losses.
Indeed, the platform still registered gains across five of its top 10 markets, with Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Egypt all seeing encouraging growth.
And just for reference, note that this table reflects values reported shortly before the American ban went into effect, so the 1.5 percent decline we see in the USA was not caused by changes in the platform’s availability in that country.
Making sense of TikTok trends
However, despite those drops in reported ad reach, our analysis of data from a number of reliable third parties – including GWI, data.ai, Similarweb, and Semrush – shows no sign of any drop in actual TikTok use.
Indeed, all the data we’ve seen suggests that active TikTok user numbers continue to increase at healthy rates.
As a result, we’re confident that the declines apparent in TikTok’s ad reach numbers are the result of corrections in reported figures – potentially due to the removal of duplicate and inauthentic accounts – and these trends do not imply any negative change in real, “human” users.
However, marketers will still want to keep an eye on these changes, because real ad budgets can quickly be consumed by the activity of inauthentic accounts and bots.
Moreover, third-party data points to a global TikTok user total that may be meaningfully lower than the figure suggested by ByteDance’s ad reach numbers.
Conversely, the active user figures that these third-party tools report for other large social platforms tends to be a much closer match to what we see in those platforms’ respective ad reach numbers.
TikTok clocks time wins
But user figures aside, different numbers in data.ai’s intelligence suite point to yet more success for TikTok over recent months.
For example, the average monthly time that the typical TikTok user spends using the platform’s Android app increased by almost two hours between August and November, resulting in a quarter-on-quarter increase of almost 6 percent.
At a worldwide level, TikTok’s Android user base spent almost 35 hours using the platform’s app in November 2024, which equates to more than two whole waking days that month.
And for comparison, TikTok users spend almost 8 hours per month longer using TikTok’s Android app than YouTube users spend using the YouTube Android app in November 2024.
Moreover, TikTok users now spend more than twice as much time using TikTok as Instagram users spend using Instagram.
Interestingly, data.ai’s intelligence suggests that average TikTok session time actually declined slightly between August and November, but the average number of sessions per month increased by roughly 10 percent.
The latest figures show that the typical user opened TikTok’s Android app an average of 360 times in November 2024, which equates to an average of 12 sessions per day.
Meanwhile, the same dataset suggests that the typical TikTok session now lasts 5 minutes and 49 seconds.
And if we take a moment to digest the implications of this data, it seems as though the average TikTok user opens the app at least once every 90 minutes, and then spends close to 6 minutes using it.
In other words, on the basis that the typical person spends between 7 and 8 hours each day sleeping, it seems as though the average TikTok user spends roughly 7 percent of their waking life watching TikToks.
But remember, that’s the global average.
More strikingly, data.ai’s intelligence suggests that the average Indonesian TikTok user spent almost 45 hours using the app in November 2024.
And despite recent corrections in reported ad reach figures, Indonesia remains TikTok’s second largest market.
And these figures suggest that – across the archipelago – more than 100 million Indonesian users spent an average of roughly 9 percent of their waking lives just using TikTok in November 2024.
Tik, tik, boom
But to offer an ever more vivid sense of the scale involved when it comes to TikTok, it’s worth considering that the 6.6 billion TikToks tagged with “#FYP” attracted an incremental 24 trillion views in 2024 alone.
And yes, that really is trillions.
That means that – on average – TikToks tagged with “#FYP” enjoyed more than 760,000 views every single second during 2024.
And whichever way you look at them, those figures are just staggering.
YouTube still the clear winner
And yet – despite these eye-watering TikTok stats – YouTube still accounts for the greatest overall share of time spent using social platforms, thanks to its significantly larger user base.
Sure enough, recent trends have propelled TikTok into second place in the rankings by total time, and as we’ve seen, the platform delivers some seriously impressive numbers.
However, YouTube is so dominant that it still accounts for a greater share of time than TikTok and Instagram… combined.
Mind. Blown. 🤯
The outlook for TikTok in 2025
But what about the future?
Well, despite the app’s temporary US reprieve, TikTok’s outlook in America remains uncertain at the time of writing.
For perspective, the US is still TikTok’s largest market, and with close to 136 million active adult accounts, the United States accounts for roughly 8½ percent of TikTok’s global ad audience.
And furthermore, based on the average revenue per user (ARPU) figures that we see for other platforms, we can assume that America accounts for a significant proportion of TikTok’s revenues.
As a result, ByteDance would certainly feel the hit of a TikTok ban in the States.
Moreover, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the platform’s users would feel that loss keenly too.
For example, data.ai intelligence suggests that US users spend an average of almost 44 hours per month using the TikTok app, opening it an average of roughly 9 times each day.
But even if TikTok were to lose its American user base, it’s likely that the platform would still be one of six largest platforms in the world by active users.
However, the more important questions are whether an outright ban in the United States would result in similar legislation in other countries, and whether users outside of the US would follow their favourite American creators to other platforms.
Reddit’s ad reach doubles
But TikTok isn’t the only platform reporting big changes in ad reach over recent months.
Indeed, the ad reach figures reported in Reddit’s ad tools have seen a dramatic jump over the past three months.
Comparing data published in January 2025 with data published in October 2024, the potential reach of Reddit ads appears to have increased by a massive 129 percent in the final quarter of 2024.
That means Reddit’s reported global total has more than doubled since October, with an increase of 342 million taking the global total to 606 million.
These figures suggest that Reddit ads now reach close to 11 percent of the world’s internet users, and more than 1 in 14 people on Earth.
Reddit growth in perspective
However, our careful analysis of third-party data from companies including GWI, data.ai, Similarweb, and Semrush shows that – while Reddit use has indeed been increasing – it’s very unlikely that active Reddit users have doubled over the past three months.
So, our “read” of these numbers is that Reddit has either changed the ways in which it serves ads in order to reach a significantly larger proportion of its user base, or it has changed the methodology it uses to quantify and / or report ad reach in its tools.
Either way though, these new reach figures will likely be of interest to marketers.
Indeed, Reddit’s reported global reach figure of 606 million is now greater than the figure reported by X (585.8 million), and it’s also catching up with the 708.7 million reported by Snapchat.
And it’s also worth highlighting that Reddit has long been a top performer in our global website rankings.
Indeed, both Semrush and Similarweb rank Reddit.com in their top 10 domains by total traffic, and Similarweb’s unique visitor numbers offer some corroboration for the platform’s own potential ad reach figures.
It’s also telling that Reddit was one of the top 20 search terms entered into Google during 2024, with the platform even ranking ahead of Apple.
Moreover, Google appears to have identified Reddit as a popular source of “authority” when it comes to search queries, with Alphabet’s search engine increasingly suggesting “Reddit” as an additional term in its “people also search for…” feature.
r/YouSure?
However, Reddit’s reported ad reach appears to be heavily concentrated in a handful of markets, and some of the figures are starting to look a bit odd.
For example, while data from GWI confirms that Reddit is indeed popular in Canada, it’s unlikely that ads on the platform reach 106 percent of the country’s total population aged 13 and above, as implied in the figures reported in Reddit’s own tools.
Similarly, Reddit’s own reach figures for the United States, Singapore, and Australia may raise a few eyebrows.
One plausible explanation for these high figures could be a meaningful number of duplicate accounts, where the same individual manages multiple “profiles” on the platform.
As a result, marketers may want to prioritise interest targeting on Reddit, especially because activity on the platform naturally falls into clearly defined “communities”.
LinkedIn continues to grow
Meanwhile, figures reported in LinkedIn’s ad planning tools indicate that the platform’s global ad reach has increased by a hefty 17 percent over the past year.
It’s important to stress that LinkedIn reports potential ad reach based on total registered members rather than monthly active users, with the latter being the more common basis for ad reach metrics across other social platforms.
And in fact, our analysis of data from a variety of reputable third parties suggests that LinkedIn reaches around 350 million active users each month, which is significantly lower than the 1.2 billion figure reported in LinkedIn’s ad tools.
However, LinkedIn’s “audience network” extends across a wealth of third-party publishers on the web, and these placements take LinkedIn ads well beyond the confines of its own platform.
So, while LinkedIn’s audience figures may not be directly comparable with those of other social platforms, they’re still testament to the huge potential of LinkedIn ads.
However, just two countries – the United States and India – account for a third of LinkedIn’s reported total.
And while there’s still plenty of potential for continued growth in India, there appears to be limited scope for LinkedIn to continue growing in the United States, with the current US reach figure already equivalent to more than 91 percent of all American adults [note that LinkedIn’s terms of service limit use to people over the age of 16, but the platform’s ad tools only report data for users aged 18 and above].
LinkedIn is also approaching saturation in some of the world’s other top economies, with reach figures already equivalent to more than 80 percent of all adults in the UK.
Pinterest up by double digits
And it’s also been a good year for Pinterest, with the platform’s reported ad reach growing by more than 10 percent in 2024.
Pinterest ads now reach 32 million more users than they did this time last year, taking the reach of Pinterest ads beyond 5 percent of all adults aged 18 and above.
Meanwhile, the monthly active user (MAU) figures reported in the company’s investor earnings announcements point to even stronger growth for the platform as a whole, with the 537 million MAU number that the company reported in October 2024 more than 11 percent higher than the figure it reported for the same period a year earlier.
It’s also worth highlighting Pinterest’s strong female audience skew, which makes it particularly interesting for marketers hoping to engage young women.
Indeed, the company’s own data suggest that women aged 18 to 24 account for 1 in 5 members of the platform’s ad audience, making the platform particularly appealing to marketers hoping to reach this demographic.
And marketers may also be interested to explore our new dataset exploring the most followed accounts on Pinterest, which offer valuable insights into the kinds of content that users seek out on the platform.
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This article is a sub-section of our Digital 2025 Global Overview Report.
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