YouTube is still the most popular social platform
The Pew Research Center reports that the YouTube platform has seen the largest growth of any social media app among US users during the pandemic.
YouTube and Facebook continue to dominate the online landscape, with nearly 81 percent of Americans using YouTube compared to 69 percent of Facebook users.
Over the past year and during the coronavirus pandemic, YouTube and Reddit have seen significant growth, and in the Pew poll, which was the first of its kind since 2019, YouTube remained the most used online platform.
The Google-owned video service has seen usage grow from 73 percent of adults in the United States in 2019 to 81 percent in 2021.
This was closely followed by Reddit, which saw usage growth from 11 percent of US adults in 2019 to 18 percent in 2021.
The conclusions are drawn from a survey of 1,502 adults in the United States conducted from January 25 to February 8, 2021.
YouTube is particularly popular among people between the ages of 18 and 29, with 95 percent saying they use the service.
Among that age group, 71 percent said they use Instagram, 70 percent said they use Facebook, and 65 percent said they use Snapchat.
Facebook usage remains high among Americans, with 69 percent of adults in the United States saying they visit the social network.
However, that number has remained relatively steady over the past five years, according to the Pew Research Center.
The report included TikTok and Nextdoor for the first time, and the report said: 21 percent of Americans use TikTok, and 13 percent use Nextdoor.
As of last May, Google's owned video-sharing platform accounted for 15 percent of total traffic through consumer broadband networks around the world, according to a report by Sandvine.
This exceeded 11 percent of the internet traffic from the video streaming service Netflix.
In May 2019, more than two billion people around the world used the YouTube platform and that number has continued to rise steadily in the nearly two years since then.
New data from App Annie also revealed that YouTube became the number one app in terms of consumer spending in the first quarter of this year.
In-app purchases included:
- YouTube Premium: A monthly subscription that removes ads from all videos.
- Channel Membership: A monthly subscription for a specific channel and offers various perks.
- Super Chat: A feature that allows viewers to pay to participate in chat messages with the live broadcasts of content creators.
- Super Sticker: A feature that allows viewers to pay to send stickers in chat during live broadcasts.