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Ranked: The World’s Most Popular Social Networks, and Who Owns Them

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Ranked: The World's Most Popular Social Networks, and Who Owns Them

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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.

RankPlatform nameParent companyCountryMonthly active users, in millions
#1FacebookMeta🇺🇸 U.S.2,910
#2YouTubeAlphabet🇺🇸 U.S.2,291
#3WhatsAppMeta🇺🇸 U.S.2,000
#4MessengerMeta🇺🇸 U.S.1,300
#5InstagramMeta🇺🇸 U.S.1,287
#6WeChatTencent🇨🇳 China1,225
#7KuaishouKuaishou🇨🇳 China1,000
#8TikTokBytedance🇨🇳 China1,000
#9TelegramTelegram🇦🇪 UAE600
#10QzoneTencent🇨🇳 China600
#11QQTencent🇨🇳 China591
#12WeiboSina🇨🇳 China566
#13DouyinBytedance🇨🇳 China550
#14SnapchatSnap🇺🇸 U.S.538
#15TwitterTwitter🇺🇸 U.S.463
#16PinterestPinterest🇺🇸 U.S.454
#17RedditReddit🇺🇸 U.S.430
#18LinkedInMicrosoft🇺🇸 U.S.310
#19QuoraQuora🇺🇸 U.S.300
#20SkypeMicrosoft🇺🇸 U.S.300
#21TiebaBaidu🇨🇳 China300
#22ViberRakuten🇯🇵 Japan250
#23TeamsMicrosoft🇺🇸 U.S.250
#24imoPageBites🇺🇸 U.S.212
#25LineNaver🇰🇷 South Korea169
#26PicsartPicsart🇺🇸 U.S.150
#27LikeeBigo Live🇸🇬 Singapore150
#28DiscordDiscord🇺🇸 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:

RankParent company# of companies on the listCountryCombined MUAs
1Meta4🇺🇸 U.S.7.5 billion
2Tencent3🇨🇳 China2.4 billion
3Alphabet1🇺🇸 U.S.2.3 billion
4Bytedance2🇨🇳 China1.6 billion
5Kuaishou1🇨🇳 China1 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.

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The World’s Biggest Cloud Computing Service Providers

Cloud computing service providers generated $270 billion in revenues last year, concentrated among a few giants.

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This tree map shows the biggest cloud computing service providers globally by market share.

The World’s Biggest Cloud Computing Service Providers

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.

Today, the three largest cloud computing service providers command 66% of the global market.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have generated billions in revenues through their cloud infrastructure that provide the computing power companies need to store data. What’s more, most AI models are run on the cloud, creating a surge in computing demand for cloud providers.

The above graphic shows the largest cloud providers globally, based on data from Synergy Research Group.

Breaking Down the Cloud Market

Here are the world’s top cloud computing service providers based on enterprise revenues as of the fourth quarter of 2023:

ProviderCountryMarket Share Q4 2023
Amazon Web Services🇺🇸 U.S.31%
Microsoft Azure🇺🇸 U.S.24%
Google Cloud🇺🇸 U.S.11%
Alibaba Cloud🇨🇳 China4%
Salesforce🇺🇸 U.S.3%
IBM Cloud🇺🇸 U.S.2%
Oracle🇺🇸 U.S.2%
Tencent Cloud🇨🇳 China2%
Other🌐 Other21%

With 31% of the global market share, Amazon’s cloud division posted $24.2 billion in revenues over the quarter.

AWS is a major cash engine for the company, but growth slowed over 2023 as enterprises and startups cut back on tech spending. Annual sales growth compared to the same quarter last year grew by 13%—far below competitors Microsoft and Google, whose cloud divisions grew by 30% and 26%, respectively.

As we can see, U.S. firms make up the lion’s share of the market, while China’s Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud together comprise 5% of the global share.

The AI Boom and the Cloud

Given that a significant chunk of AI models are run on the cloud, the industry may be positioned to see greater demand as momentum accelerates.

In fact, newer AI systems are as much as 10 to 100 times larger than older models. In line with this, major cloud providers are seeing high demand for cloud services to allow companies across financial to manufacturing sectors to run large language models on their platforms.

Today, 98% of companies globally rely on the cloud for at least one part of their business applications, which may present a market opportunity for the industry as advancements in AI continue to grow.

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