Social platforms sized

By usage and revenue

Another day, another data visualisation. Today: social platforms plotted by usage (Y-axis) and revenue (bubble size).

A few observations:

• Facebook may not be the cool kid in town but it’s huge and generates an eye-watering amount of revenue

• Instagram has been really effectively monetised in the last few years (generating $17 per MAU in 2020)

• Reddit has more users than Twitter but gets very little attention from the mainstream media (not enough celebs)

• Pinterest is plowing its own furrow and quietly taking $1.6bn in revenue

• There’s serious money to be made in virtual game worlds (Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft), although you can fall as quickly as you rise (Among Us would have been on this chart if I’d been drawing it a year ago, but it lost 60% of its 300m MAU in 2021)

Notes:

• Monthly Active Users isn’t the best metric but it’s the one that’s most consistently available

• I haven’t included platforms which don’t have scale outside of China (e.g. Weixin/WeChat, Douyin, QQ, Sina Weibo)

• I also haven’t included scale social platforms with zero revenue (e.g. Telegram, Facebook Messenger)