What The Current Social Media Landscape Looks Like
We’ve seen quite a consolidation of social platform usage over the last few years but this infographic from Visual Capitalist is still surprising. As you can see, the current social media landscape is dominated by one player and two lesser giants, with everyone else trailing far behind.
As you might have guessed, Meta (formerly Facebook) has more than three times the users than Alphabet (YouTube) or Tencent, coming in at around 7.5 billion monthly users. No other company is even close.
Some interesting data points from the graphic – Users spend around 2.5 hours on social media every day. And every hour 38,000 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube, which is a staggering amount. No matter how large your view count is, you’re still a drop in the YouTube bucket.
The Social Lifespan
It wasn’t that long ago that 50 million active monthly users was the signal that a platform had arrived. Now you need around 150 million just to be classified as a minor player on the world stage. Still, social platforms do have a lifespan, which seems to be closely related with the age of its users. Every generation has its own favorite, and as those users get older, they spend less time on social in general or even abandon the platform.
We’ve certainly seen that with previous platforms like Friendster and Myspace, but we’re now starting to see some of the giants like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Skype level out. Usually this is a case of a newer platform taking marketshare away, but sometimes it’s just a result of user fatigue.
While TikTok is the new hot and shiny platform that has captivated teens worldwide, one has to wonder what’s going to happen as they begin to age and have busier lives. Also, many governments are now threatening the platform with outside control or outright banishment as a result on the negative effects it’s supposedly having on youth psyche (which is fragile as is without any outside help).
Next year should be a pivotal year in the social media landscape, so expect changes in the this chart when we look back at the end
