The Rise of Social Media

By Daniela Breto
  • Period: to

    2004

    In the chart, we plot monthly active users across various platforms since 2004.
    Some large social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit, have been around for ten or more years, but others are much newer.
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    2006

    The case of MySpace is remarkable, considering that in 2006 it temporarily surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US.
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    2008

    In 2008, Hi5, MySpace, and Friendster were close competitors to Facebook
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    2011

    Since 2011 this has been possible, and today, more than 50% of the content viewed on Twitter includes images and videos
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    2016

    TikTok, for example, launched in September 2016, and by mid-2018, it had already reached half a billion users. To put this in perspective: TikTok gained, on average, about 20 million new users per month over this period.
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    2019

    Facebook, the largest social media platform in the world, had 2.4 billion users in 2019. Other social media platforms, including YouTube and WhatsApp, also had over one billion users each