{"id":558,"date":"2022-08-21T23:41:36","date_gmt":"2022-08-21T23:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/accintrotomedia\/?post_type=chapter&p=558"},"modified":"2022-08-22T00:05:40","modified_gmt":"2022-08-22T00:05:40","slug":"test","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/accintrotomedia\/chapter\/test\/","title":{"raw":"11.2 The Rise of Social Media","rendered":"11.2 The Rise of Social Media"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n
\r\n

The Rise of Social Media<\/h1>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/header><\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
Social media sites are used by more than two-thirds of all internet users. When did the rise of social media start and what are the largest sites today?<\/div>\r\n
by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (from OurWorldinData.org)<\/a><\/div>\r\n
September 18, 2019\u00a0- Last updated on\u00a0April 30, 2020<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\nFacebook, the largest social media platform in the world, has 2.4 billion users. Other social media platforms including Youtube and Whatsapp also have more than one billion users each.\r\n\r\nThese numbers are huge \u2013 there are\u00a07.7 billion people<\/a>\u00a0in the world, with at least\u00a03.5 billion of us online<\/a>. This means social media platforms are used by one-in-three people in the world, and more than two-thirds of all internet users.\r\n\r\nSocial media has changed the world. The rapid and vast adoption of these technologies is changing how we\u00a0find partners<\/a>, how we\u00a0access information from the news<\/a>, and how we\u00a0organize to demand political change<\/a>.\r\n\r\nWho uses social media? When did the rise of social media start and what are the largest sites today? Here we answer these and other key questions to understand social media use around the world.\r\n\r\nWe begin with an outline of key trends and conclude with a perspective on the rate of adoption of social media relative to other modern communication technologies.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
<\/div>\r\n
Social media started in the early 2000s<\/span><\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n
<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe first social media site to reach a million monthly active users was MySpace \u2013\u00a0it achieved this milestone around 2004. This is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it.1<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nIn the interactive chart below we plot monthly active users, by platform, since 2004. You can use the slider to focus on particular years, and you can click the \u2018+ Add\u2019 option to change series and track the evolution of other social media platforms.\r\n\r\nThis chart shows that there are some large social media sites that have been around for ten or more years, such as Facebook, YouTube and Reddit; but other large sites are much newer.\r\n\r\nTikTok, 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.\r\n\r\nThe data also shows rapid changes in the opposite direction. Once-dominant platforms have disappeared. In 2008, Hi5, MySpace and Friendster were close competitors to Facebook, yet by 2012 they had virtually no share of the market. The case of MySpace is remarkable considering that in 2006 it\u00a0temporarily surpassed Google<\/a>\u00a0as the most visited website in the US.\r\n\r\nMost of the social media platforms that survived the last decade have shifted significantly in what they offer users. Twitter, for example, didn\u2019t allow users to upload videos or images in the beginning. Since 2011 this is possible and today\u00a0more than 50%<\/a>\u00a0of the content viewed on Twitter includes images and videos.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
<\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\n\u00a0\"\"\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
<\/div>\r\n