In 2008, Hi5, MySpace, and Friendster were close competitors to Facebook, yet by 2012 they had virtually no market share. Once-dominant platforms have disappeared. The data also shows rapid changes in the opposite direction. To put this in perspective: TikTok gained, on average, about 20 million new users per month over this period. TikTok, for example, launched in September 2016, and by mid-2018, it had already reached half a billion users. Some large social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit, have been around for ten or more years, but others are much newer. In the chart, we plot monthly active users across various platforms since 2004.

This is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it. MySpace was the first social media site to reach a million monthly active users – it achieved this milestone around 2004. We begin with an outline of key trends and conclude with a perspective on the social media adoption rate relative to other modern communication technologies. Who uses social media? When did the rise of social media start, and how has the number of users changed over time? Here we answer these and other key questions to understand the history of social media worldwide. The rapid and vast adoption of these technologies is changing how we find partners, access information from the news, and organize to demand political change. This means social media platforms were used by one in three people worldwide and more than two-thirds of all Internet users. These numbers are huge – in 2019, there were 7.7 billion people worldwide, with at least 3.5 billion online. Other social media platforms, including YouTube and WhatsApp, also had over one billion users each. Due to data availability, the article and charts will not be updated.įacebook, the largest social media platform in the world, had 2.4 billion users in 2019. This article is an archived version of an article published in 2019.

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