YouTube, the most popular platform in the United States has been able to grow among the adult population from 73% in 2019 to 81% in 2021, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
The latest studies highlight that YouTube and Reddit were the social networks that experienced the most growth in the US. Reddit, which targets a much more specific niche, grew from 11% to 18% over the course of 2020.
YouTube grew 81% during the COVID-19 pandemic
YouTube’s growth aligns with other previous market studies that already pointed to a significant increase in video consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Reddit’s case can be explained by the change in the way young people, the platform’s main users, socialize.
In addition, Reddit was the network where the so-called GameStop phenomenon took shape between late 2020 and early 2021, in which hundreds of thousands of small investors bought shares of companies that were undervalued on Wall Street such as GameStop, AMC, or BlackBerry, and boosted their price on the market.
The second most used social network by Americans is Facebook, to which 69% regularly connect, although the company led by Mark Zuckerberg has hardly gained any new users since 2016.
At a considerable distance behind there are platforms such as Instagram (owned by Facebook) with 40%; Pinterest, with 31%; LinkedIn, with 28%; and Snapchat, with 25%. Twitter ranks as high as seventh, with 23% of Americans regularly logging on to this social network. China’s TikTok is used by 21% of the country’s adult population.
If only the young adult population is taken into account, i.e. those aged between 18 and 29, the statistics vary significantly, with the use of Instagram (71%), Snapchat (65%), and TikTok (48%) being strongly reinforced.
