Technology
Ranked: The World’s Most Popular Social Networks, and Who Owns Them
The World’s Most Popular Social Networks, and Who Owns Them
Currently, there are over 4.5 billion people around the world who use some form of social media—about 57% of the global population.
Yet, while social media’s audience is widespread and diverse, just a handful of companies control a majority of the world’s most popular social media platforms. Meta, the tech giant formerly known as Facebook, owns four of the five most widely used platforms.
This graphic highlights the biggest social networks across the globe, measured by their monthly active users (MAUs).
Note: We’ll be using terms like “social network” and “social platform” interchangeably to refer to various messaging, video, and image-sharing platforms that have social attributes built in.
Top Social Platforms by Monthly Active Users
To measure each platform’s MAUs, we dug into various sources, including the most recent company SEC filings, and quarterly earnings reports.
A majority of Meta’s user base comes from its most popular platform, Facebook—the social media giant currently has around 2.9 billion MAUs worldwide.
Rank | Platform name | Parent company | Country | Monthly active users, in millions |
---|---|---|---|---|
#1 | Meta | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 2,910 | |
#2 | YouTube | Alphabet | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 2,291 |
#3 | Meta | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 2,000 | |
#4 | Messenger | Meta | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 1,300 |
#5 | Meta | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 1,287 | |
#6 | Tencent | 🇨🇳 China | 1,225 | |
#7 | Kuaishou | Kuaishou | 🇨🇳 China | 1,000 |
#8 | TikTok | Bytedance | 🇨🇳 China | 1,000 |
#9 | Telegram | Telegram | 🇦🇪 UAE | 600 |
#10 | Qzone | Tencent | 🇨🇳 China | 600 |
#11 | Tencent | 🇨🇳 China | 591 | |
#12 | Sina | 🇨🇳 China | 566 | |
#13 | Douyin | Bytedance | 🇨🇳 China | 550 |
#14 | Snapchat | Snap | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 538 |
#15 | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 463 | ||
#16 | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 454 | ||
#17 | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 430 | ||
#18 | Microsoft | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 310 | |
#19 | Quora | Quora | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 300 |
#20 | Skype | Microsoft | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 300 |
#21 | Tieba | Baidu | 🇨🇳 China | 300 |
#22 | Viber | Rakuten | 🇯🇵 Japan | 250 |
#23 | Teams | Microsoft | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 250 |
#24 | imo | PageBites | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 212 |
#25 | Line | Naver | 🇰🇷 South Korea | 169 |
#26 | Picsart | Picsart | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 150 |
#27 | Likee | Bigo Live | 🇸🇬 Singapore | 150 |
#28 | Discord | Discord | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 140 |
Where in the world are Facebook users located? The platform’s biggest user base comes from India, with an audience size of almost 350 million. Its second-largest user base is the United States, with 193.9 million users, while Indonesia comes in third with 142.5 million.
But Facebook isn’t the only social giant in Meta’s network of platforms. WhatsApp has approximately 2 billion MAUs, making it Meta’s second-largest platform, and the third-largest social network overall.
Like Facebook, a significant number of WhatsApp users are located in India, with roughly 390 million users. Brazil has a large portion of WhatsApp users as well, with an audience size of 108 million.
The Billion Users Club
Meta currently dominates the social network landscape, with a combined total of 7.5 billion MAUs across all four of its platforms. However, a few other companies also hit the one billion MAU mark across all their platforms on the list:
Rank | Parent company | # of companies on the list | Country | Combined MUAs |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Meta | 4 | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 7.5 billion |
2 | Tencent | 3 | 🇨🇳 China | 2.4 billion |
3 | Alphabet | 1 | 🇺🇸 U.S. | 2.3 billion |
4 | Bytedance | 2 | 🇨🇳 China | 1.6 billion |
5 | Kuaishou | 1 | 🇨🇳 China | 1 billion |
After Meta, Tencent has the second-highest reach thanks to its three platforms—WeChat, Qzone, and QQ. Of the three, WeChat is currently the most popular. On average, WeChat users send about 45 billion messages a day.
Third on the list is Alphabet, thanks to its one platform, YouTube. Founded in 2005, this video streaming platform currently has over 50 million content creators, who share approximately 500 hours of video content every minute.
Close behind Alphabet is Bytedance, with a combined 1.6 billion MAUs across its two platforms—Douyin and its international counterpart TikTok. While the apps share a lot of similarities, they function as completely separate entities, with different registration, content policies, and regulations.
Global Social Networks? Not Always
While social media networks often transcend country borders, it’s worth noting that the online realm does not completely escape the constraints and regulations of our physical world.
Since 2009, Facebook has been banned in China for not complying with censorship rules. Facebook was also blocked in Iran and Syria around the same time and has been blocked sporadically since.
In 2020, the Trump administration tried to enact a similar ban against TikTok, but the order was blocked by a federal judge and eventually revoked by the Biden administration a year later.
Despite various bans and roadblocks, it’s clear that social media platforms have seeped into the lives (and onto the screens) of users across the globe. And as internet access worldwide continues to grow, so too will the number of social media users.
Technology
Visualizing AI Patents by Country
See which countries have been granted the most AI patents each year, from 2012 to 2022.
Visualizing AI Patents by Country
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
This infographic shows the number of AI-related patents granted each year from 2010 to 2022 (latest data available). These figures come from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), accessed via Stanford University’s 2024 AI Index Report.
From this data, we can see that China first overtook the U.S. in 2013. Since then, the country has seen enormous growth in the number of AI patents granted each year.
Year | China | EU and UK | U.S. | RoW | Global Total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2010 | 307 | 137 | 984 | 571 | 1,999 |
2011 | 516 | 129 | 980 | 581 | 2,206 |
2012 | 926 | 112 | 950 | 660 | 2,648 |
2013 | 1,035 | 91 | 970 | 627 | 2,723 |
2014 | 1,278 | 97 | 1,078 | 667 | 3,120 |
2015 | 1,721 | 110 | 1,135 | 539 | 3,505 |
2016 | 1,621 | 128 | 1,298 | 714 | 3,761 |
2017 | 2,428 | 144 | 1,489 | 1,075 | 5,136 |
2018 | 4,741 | 155 | 1,674 | 1,574 | 8,144 |
2019 | 9,530 | 322 | 3,211 | 2,720 | 15,783 |
2020 | 13,071 | 406 | 5,441 | 4,455 | 23,373 |
2021 | 21,907 | 623 | 8,219 | 7,519 | 38,268 |
2022 | 35,315 | 1,173 | 12,077 | 13,699 | 62,264 |
In 2022, China was granted more patents than every other country combined.
While this suggests that the country is very active in researching the field of artificial intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily mean that China is the farthest in terms of capability.
Key Facts About AI Patents
According to CSET, AI patents relate to mathematical relationships and algorithms, which are considered abstract ideas under patent law. They can also have different meaning, depending on where they are filed.
In the U.S., AI patenting is concentrated amongst large companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Google. On the other hand, AI patenting in China is more distributed across government organizations, universities, and tech firms (e.g. Tencent).
In terms of focus area, China’s patents are typically related to computer vision, a field of AI that enables computers and systems to interpret visual data and inputs. Meanwhile America’s efforts are more evenly distributed across research fields.
Learn More About AI From Visual Capitalist
If you want to see more data visualizations on artificial intelligence, check out this graphic that shows which job departments will be impacted by AI the most.
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