These TikTok user statistics tell the whole story of the new social media giant and give you some insights into the app's future.

TikTok has 136 million monthly active users in the US alone.

Teenagers make up the largest group of active users on TikTok.

The average adult TikTok user in America spends 33 minutes per day on the app.

There are currently over 1.5 billion active users on TikTok worldwide.

TikTok is developing into a key platform for news, advertising, politics, online shopping, and entertainment in Germany, with over 20 million monthly users. Especially among young people, TikTok plays an increasing role in their information environment. We provide a human-coded dataset of over 4,000 TikTok videos from German-speaking news outlets from 2023. The coding includes descriptive variables of the videos (e.g., visual style, text overlays, and audio presence) and theory-derived concepts from the journalism sciences (e.g., news values).

This dataset consists of every second video published in 2023 by major news outlets active on TikTok from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The data collection was facilitated with the official TikTok API in January 2024. The manual coding took place between September 2024 and December 2024. For a detailed description of the data collection, validation, annotation and descriptive analysis, please refer to:

Mayer, A.-T., Wedel, L., Batzner, J., Hendrickx, J., Bremer, E., Iwan, A., Stocker, V., & Ohme, J. (2025). News on TikTok: An Annotated Dataset of TikTok Videos from German-Speaking News Outlets in 2023. Proceedings of the Nineteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 19, forthcoming.

Globally the average user spends 52 minutes on TikTok every day. About 90% of their worldwide users access TikTok on a daily basis.

The research project, SPARTA (Social Media Analysis for Everyone), funded by dtec.bw (which is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU), monitors the 2025 German federal election live as it unfolds on TikTok, YouTube and X/Twitter. Since November 7, 2024, the day the "traffic light" coalition collapsed, we have been collecting and analyzing all German-language posts and reposts on X (formerly Twitter) related to the federal elections. Simultaneously, we gather data from TikTok and YouTube, focusing on the accounts of political parties, including those of candidates and current members of the Bundestag, during the same period. Our analysis includes, among other things, the stances expressed towards political parties and leading candidates, the most discussed issues and hashtags, the outreach of political parties across different platforms, the visibility of female candidates, the occurrence of negative campaigning, the rise of toxic language, and the activity of various actors across platforms. We publish the results in real time on our publicly accessible dashboard (https://dtecbw.de/sparta/), which provides interactive and customizable graphics, making it relevant to a broad audience from politics, academia, journalism, and society. To facilitate real-time analysis of the election campaign, we compiled a dataset based on the data of the federal election officer (Bundeswahlleiterin), containing the TikTok, YouTube and X/Twitter handles of all candidates running for a seat in the parliament. This dataset includes the handles as well as additional information about the candidates from eight political parties: AfD, BSW, Buendnis 90/Die Gruenen, CDU, CSU, Die Linke, FDP and SPD.

Regional TikTok user statistics differentiate significantly. Each major region has also experienced growth a different times.

TikTok has a significantly larger female user base globally.

A structured dataset comparing viral view thresholds and timeframes across major platforms, including TikTok, YouTube (long-form & Shorts), Instagram Reels, Facebook, Twitter (X), LinkedIn Video, and LinkedIn Posts.

In 2020, TikTok brought in $33.4 billion in revenue.

TikTok has risen through the ranks to become the 5th most popular social media network worldwide.

As of January 2024, Instagram was slightly more popular with men than women, with men accounting for 50.6 percent of the platform’s global users. Additionally, the social media app was most popular amongst younger audiences, with almost 32 percent of users aged between 18 and 24 years.

              Instagram’s Global Audience

              As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social media platform globally, reaching two billion monthly active users (MAU). This number is projected to keep growing with no signs of slowing down, which is not a surprise as the global online social penetration rate across all regions is constantly increasing.
              As of January 2024, the country with the largest Instagram audience was India with 362.9 million users, followed by the United States with 169.7 million users.

              Who is winning over the generations?

              Even though Instagram’s audience is almost twice the size of TikTok’s on a global scale, TikTok has shown itself to be a fierce competitor, particularly amongst younger audiences. TikTok was the most downloaded mobile app globally in 2022, generating 672 million downloads. As of 2022, Generation Z in the United States spent more time on TikTok than on Instagram monthly.

As of April 2024, around 16.5 percent of global active Instagram users were men between the ages of 18 and 24 years. More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide was aged 34 years or younger.

              Teens and social media

              As one of the biggest social networks worldwide, Instagram is especially popular with teenagers. As of fall 2020, the photo-sharing app ranked third in terms of preferred social network among teenagers in the United States, second to Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was one of the most influential advertising channels among female Gen Z users when making purchasing decisions. Teens report feeling more confident, popular, and better about themselves when using social media, and less lonely, depressed and anxious.
              Social media can have negative effects on teens, which is also much more pronounced on those with low emotional well-being. It was found that 35 percent of teenagers with low social-emotional well-being reported to have experienced cyber bullying when using social media, while in comparison only five percent of teenagers with high social-emotional well-being stated the same. As such, social media can have a big impact on already fragile states of mind.

Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most popular Instagram accounts as of April 2024.

              The Portuguese footballer is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with 628 million followers. Instagram's own account was ranked first with roughly 672 million followers.

              How popular is Instagram?

              Instagram is a photo-sharing social networking service that enables users to take pictures and edit them with filters. The platform allows users to post and share their images online and directly with their friends and followers on the social network. The cross-platform app reached one billion monthly active users in mid-2018. In 2020, there were over 114 million Instagram users in the United States and experts project this figure to surpass 127 million users in 2023.

              Who uses Instagram?

              Instagram audiences are predominantly young – recent data states that almost 60 percent of U.S. Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger. Fall 2020 data reveals that Instagram is also one of the most popular social media for teens and one of the social networks with the biggest reach among teens in the United States.

              Celebrity influencers on Instagram
              Many celebrities and athletes are brand spokespeople and generate additional income with social media advertising and sponsored content. Unsurprisingly, Ronaldo ranked first again, as the average media value of one of his Instagram posts was 985,441 U.S. dollars.

As of April 2024, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 18 and 24 years, and 30.6 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16 percent of users belonged to the 35 to 44 year age group.

              Instagram users

              With roughly one billion monthly active users, Instagram belongs to the most popular social networks worldwide. The social photo sharing app is especially popular in India and in the United States, which have respectively 362.9 million and 169.7 million Instagram users each.

              Instagram features

              One of the most popular features of Instagram is Stories. Users can post photos and videos to their Stories stream and the content is live for others to view for 24 hours before it disappears. In January 2019, the company reported that there were 500 million daily active Instagram Stories users. Instagram Stories directly competes with Snapchat, another photo sharing app that initially became famous due to it’s “vanishing photos” feature.
              As of the second quarter of 2021, Snapchat had 293 million daily active users.

Instagram’s most popular post

              As of April 2024, the most popular post on Instagram was Lionel Messi and his teammates after winning the 2022 FIFA World Cup with Argentina, posted by the account @leomessi. Messi's post, which racked up over 61 million likes within a day, knocked off the reigning post, which was 'Photo of an Egg'. Originally posted in January 2021, 'Photo of an Egg' surpassed the world’s most popular Instagram post at that time, which was a photo by Kylie Jenner’s daughter totaling 18 million likes.
              After several cryptic posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself to be a part of a mental health campaign aimed at the pressures of social media use.

              Instagram’s most popular accounts

              As of April 2024, the official Instagram account @instagram had the most followers of any account on the platform, with 672 million followers. Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) was the most followed individual with 628 million followers, while Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) was the most followed woman on the platform with 429 million. Additionally, Inter Miami CF striker Lionel Messi (@leomessi) had a total of 502 million. Celebrities such as The Rock, Kylie Jenner, and Ariana Grande all had over 380 million followers each.

              Instagram influencers

              In the United States, the leading content category of Instagram influencers was lifestyle, with 15.25 percent of influencers creating lifestyle content in 2021. Music ranked in second place with 10.96 percent, followed by family with 8.24 percent. Having a large audience can be very lucrative: Instagram influencers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom with over 90,000 followers made around 1,221 US dollars per post.

              Instagram around the globe

              Instagram’s worldwide popularity continues to grow, and India is the leading country in terms of number of users, with over 362.9 million users as of January 2024. The United States had 169.65 million Instagram users and Brazil had 134.6 million users. The social media platform was also very popular in Indonesia and Turkey, with 100.9 and 57.1, respectively. As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social network in the world, behind Facebook, YouTube and WhatsApp.

As of April 2024, it was found that men between the ages of 25 and 34 years made up Facebook largest audience, accounting for 18.4 percent of global users. Additionally, Facebook's second largest audience base could be found with men aged 18 to 24 years.

              Facebook connects the world

              Founded in 2004 and going public in 2012, Facebook is one of the biggest internet companies in the world with influence that goes beyond social media. It is widely considered as one of the Big Four tech companies, along with Google, Apple, and Amazon (all together known under the acronym GAFA). Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide and the company also owns three other billion-user properties: mobile messaging apps WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger,
              as well as photo-sharing app Instagram. Facebook usersThe vast majority of Facebook users connect to the social network via mobile devices. This is unsurprising, as Facebook has many users in mobile-first online markets. Currently, India ranks first in terms of Facebook audience size with 378 million users. The United States, Brazil, and Indonesia also all have more than 100 million Facebook users each.