Reports: Social

Browse all of our reports, featuring our analysts' expert insights and analysis of audience segmentation, emerging trends and technologies, value chains, market shares, predictions and more – backed by our proprietary survey data and bespoke models & forecasts. Become a subscriber to get new ones every month, or just pick one to get started.

Social audiences are fragmenting
Social platform user profile

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Hanna Kahlert

May 2025

YouTube

YouTube

Facebook

The social marketplace has been growing – but attention is a finite resource, as is consumer time. As a result, audience attention is fragmenting across many different apps, with the biggest – YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok –still dominating.

The future of (US) TikTok
Implications for the social marketplace

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Hanna Kahlert

April 2025

Social

Business Strategy

TikTok

TikTok has played a significant role in digital culture over the last five years, driven largely by pandemic-era adoption and knock-on effects. From marketing strategies to viral trends, it has become inextricable from Gen Z culture. Yet it now faces risk of disruption in the US and possibly beyond as a result.

Social 2025
Navigating platforms for fan power

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Hanna Kahlert

February 2025

Creators

Spotify

Social

The biggest apps are in the process of disruption. TikTok’s uncertain future and Meta’s apps relaxing content restrictions and fact checking will constitute greater challenges for creators, advertisers, and audiences looking to use and benefit from these platforms.

Social platform user behaviour
Q3 2024

Cover image for Social platform user behaviour

Hanna Kahlert

December 2024

Marketing Strategy

Competition among social platforms is intensifying, with attention largely saturated and new regulations poised to upset the balance of power among incumbents. While growth is left in the overall market, it will largely be driven by YouTube and a cohort of smaller disruptor platforms – with fragmentation happening as these disruptors begin to eat up new growth in the marketplace.

MIDiA Research 2024-2031 global social forecasts
New frontiers and strong growth ahead

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Hanna Kahlert and Mark Qi

November 2024

YouTube

Facebook

Instagram

More than ever, social platforms are the de facto way that consumers interact not only with entertainment but with the internet itself. As internet access expands in emerging markets and social platforms continue to eat up digital entertainment consumption in developed ones, further growth is inevitable because the market has: The ability to grow user numbers The ability to grow time spent by those users The ability to make more money from that time spent, both from ads and increasingly from new subscription offerings Social as it was in the 2000s and 2010s has matured.

Social is eating entertainment
The future of memes, music, social platforms, and beyond

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Hanna Kahlert

October 2024

Product Strategy

Entertainment is now a key reason consumers engage with social platforms, opening new opportunities for social and raising new challenges for traditional entertainment. Social platforms offer not only a place to consume original content IP, but to create content around it, engage with the content discussing and unpacking it, and interact with other fans and viewers.

Social platform user behaviour
Q1 2024

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Hanna Kahlert

July 2024

Marketing Strategy

The social platform marketplace is mature, with user growth stabilising, and the established platforms now fiercely competing for shares of a finite amount of available time. This report analyses the behaviours of the audiences engaging with social platforms; including daily active use market shares, monetisation aptitude, social video time spent, and primary reasons for using the apps.

Death of the town square
Social fragmentation and a decentralised digital future

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Hanna Kahlert

June 2024

Cultural trends

Social platforms have long ‘civilised’ the online world by providing common gathering grounds, but internal disruption and proliferating competition threaten this status quo. While the dominant players are unlikely to change substantially, competition, on-platform feature fragmentation, and algorithmic ‘filter bubbles’ will dilute social platforms’ common-ground value.

Social landscape
Mapping the balance of platforms’ audience, features, and strategy

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Hanna Kahlert

February 2024

Audience Insight

This report maps how social platforms are used by consumers, looking at behaviours such as talking to friends, shopping / browsing, and creating content. It further looks at how this differs with age. The current marketplace is maturing, with platforms now either pursuing a “do everything well” or a “do one thing the best” approach.

The future revenue roadmap for ‘social’ platforms
Ads, subscriptions, and creator tools

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Hanna Kahlert

December 2023

Product Strategy

As social platforms take a prominent role in the businesses of both professional creators and entertainment companies, and user creativity expands, social platforms have an opportunity to diversify their revenue streams and evolve their USPs in this changing marketplace.

Not all social entertainment behaviour is created equal
Audience deep dive

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Hanna Kahlert

July 2023

Spotify

YouTube

Xbox

Social is an integral part of entertainment consumption This report presents key data and insights about the advanced overlaps between social behaviour (both on digital platforms and in real life) and entertainment consumption. It looks at data from nine markets, featuring segments of social platform users and the audiences of different forms of entertainment, as well as fandom behaviours and monetisation opportunities.

Web 3.0 is here
Navigating the new culture of digital entertainment

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Hanna Kahlert

May 2023

Spotify

YouTube

Netflix

AI has already hit entertainment at the industry level – and the impacts on audience culture will not be far behind. A variety of AI tools are now readily available on ‘fremium’ tiers at a consumer level. Companies may be looking towards what the new world of web 3.

Social platform user snapshot
Q4 2022

Cover image for Social platform user snapshot

Hanna Kahlert

April 2023

Audience Insight

Media and Marketing

This slide deck presents a snapshot of different social platform users, including age breakdowns, activity on social platforms, and cross-platform usage. It covers Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, and TikTok.

Social platform user snapshot Q3 2022

Cover image for Social platform user snapshot Q3 2022

Hanna Kahlert

January 2023

Social media

Audience Insight

Media and Marketing

This slide deck presents a snapshot of different social platform users, including age breakdowns, time spent on social overall, time spent creating content, and ad tolerance. It covers Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, and TikTok.

Social 2.0
Social media’s survival of the fittest, and how marketers fit in

Cover image for Social 2.0

Ashleigh Millar

December 2022

YouTube

Netflix

Facebook

The history of social media has long been defined by continual evolution and iteration, but now shifts across the value chain are becoming more substantive, heralding a new era. Social platforms themselves are changing, and so too are the attitudes, expectations, and behaviours of their users, with audiences’ appetites for carefully curated, heavily edited posts turning sour, and their thirst for authentic, participatory content growing stronger.

Lean-through listening
The impact of context on consumption and ad responsiveness

Cover image for Lean-through listening

Hanna Kahlert

November 2022

Media and Marketing

This slidedeck features data from MIDiA’s Q3 2022 Consumer Survey, looking at segments ofmusic listeners, and their listening and discovery behaviours. This coversmusic services consumption, music video viewing, music downloading, playlistcuration behaviour, attending concerts, and more.

Social media marketing is becoming its own cultural moment

Cover image for Social media marketing is becoming its own cultural moment

Hanna Kahlert and Ashleigh Millar

October 2022

Spotify

YouTube

Facebook

Audiences are changing the ways they interact with entertainment, as well as how they respond to advertising and marketing designed to promote it. Audiences are increasingly creative and engage in lean-through behaviours, are less tolerant of ads, and want more authenticity in their digital social lives.

The shift indoors
Entertainment audiences’ search for the affordable and the meaningful

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Hanna Kahlert

September 2022

Apple TV

Netflix

Disney

The Covid-19 entertainment boom is over; we are now in a highly competitive attention recession characterised largely by the attention inflation driven from accelerating rates of multitasking. This is compounded by serious global events and a cost-of-living crisis which will reduce the money audiences have available to spend on digital entertainment.

Lean-through consumption
Communities are key

Cover image for Lean-through consumption

Hanna Kahlert

August 2022

Spotify

YouTube

Netflix

Entertainment consumption is increasingly shaped by context, as consumers are driven by attention saturation to overlap behaviours as well as choose between them. Different forms of entertainment are better suited to different contexts, with some lending themselves to more social behaviours than others.

The rise of the lean-through superfan
Post-Covid trends of UGC creation and entertainment

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Hanna Kahlert

July 2022

Twitch

Instagram

TikTok

The Covid-driven entertainment boom is over, with ‘in real life’ activities taking back ground from the 12% of additional time freed by lockdown measures. The attention crunch is compounded by a cost-of-living crisis, driving consumers to make savvy choices about how much they spend, and on what.

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