Internet

As of October 2025, 6.04 billion people worldwide were internet users, representing 73.2 percent of the global population. Of these, 5.66 billion, or 68.7 percent, were social media users.

The internet connects billions globally and is central to the modern information society. In 2025, Northern Europe had the highest penetration rate, with the Netherlands, Norway, and Saudi Arabia reporting 99 percent usage. North Korea ranked last, with almost no public access. East Asia had the most online users – over 1.34 billion – followed by South Asia with about 1.2 billion. China, India, and the United States led all countries by user numbers.

In 2024, women accounted for 65 percent of global internet users, five points fewer than men, with the largest gender gap in Africa. Usage was highest among people aged 15 to 24, reaching 98 percent in Europe. Access stood at 93 percent in high-income markets, compared with 27 percent in low-income ones.

As of October 2025, Northern Europe recorded the highest internet penetration rate worldwide, with 97.7 percent of its population using the internet. Western Europe followed with a rate of 95.1 percent. Globally, the average internet adoption rate stood at approximately 73.2 percent.

The ongoing development of telecommunication networks and infrastructure has directly impacted internet penetration on a global scale. Thanks to advancing mobile technology and the continuous modernization of previously less-developed regions, the number of internet users worldwide has been on the rise in recent years, reaching 5.45 billion as of July 2024. In the world-wide-web, Google's Chrome still holds the largest market share for internet browsers, roughly 65.2 percent of the total market as of August 2024, followed by Apple's Safari at nearly 19 percent. 

Asia has the most extensive internet user base – more than an estimated 2.9 billion internet users in this region alone – with East Asia accounting for most of this share. Despite this region's large volume of internet users, Asia is far from being a leader regarding online penetration. Eastern Asia, for instance, had an online penetration rate of 75.3 percent as of April 2023.

Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than three billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns four of the biggest social media platforms, all with more than one billion monthly active users each: Facebook (core platform), WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook reported around four billion monthly core Family product users.

Most top-ranked social networks with more than 100 million users originated in the United States, but services like Chinese social networks WeChat, QQ, or video-sharing app Douyin have also garnered mainstream appeal in their respective regions due to local context and content. Douyin’s popularity has led to the platform releasing an international version of its network, TikTok.

The leading social networks are usually available in multiple languages and enable users to connect with friends or people across geographical, political, or economic borders. In 2025, social networking sites are estimated to reach 5.44 billion users, and these figures are still expected to grow as mobile device usage and mobile social networks increasingly gain traction in previously underserved markets.

As of October 2025, Eastern Asia and Northern Europe recorded the highest social media penetration rates worldwide, at 88.1 percent and 79 percent, respectively. In contrast, Eastern and Middle Africa had the lowest levels of social network usage. Overall, the global average penetration rate stood at 68.7 percent.

In 2023, 4.89 billion people around the world were using social media, and the number of users is projected to continue rising to almost six billion by 2027. Meta’s Facebook is the most popular social media network globally, with more than three billion monthly active users (MAU). Meta Platforms owns four of the ten leading social media networks globally, each with more than one billion MAU: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger.

As of January 2024, the UAE had the highest social media penetration rate out of selected countries and territories. Brazil and Morocco were close to the global average of 62.3 percent, with 66.3 and 55.7 percent, respectively, while Kenya reached only 23.5 percent. Although India’s active social media penetration rate was below average at 32.2 percent, the country had the second largest social media audience in the world, with 755 million social media users in 2022.

Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most popular Instagram accounts as of June 2025. The Portuguese footballer is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with 654 million followers. Instagram's own account was ranked first with roughly 689 million followers. 

Instagram is a photo-sharing social networking service that enables users to take pictures and edit them with filters. The platform allows users to post and share their images online and directly with their friends and followers on the social network. The cross-platform app reached one billion monthly active users in mid-2018. In 2020, there were over 114 million Instagram users in the United States and experts project this figure to surpass 127 million users in 2023.

Instagram audiences are predominantly young – recent data states that almost 60 percent of U.S. Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger. Fall 2020 data reveals that Instagram is also one of the most popular social media for teens and one of the social networks with the biggest reach among teens in the United States.

Many celebrities and athletes are brand spokespeople and generate additional income with social media advertising and sponsored content. Unsurprisingly, Ronaldo ranked first again, as the average media value of one of his Instagram posts was 985,441 U.S. dollars.

As of the most recent fiscal quarter ending March 2025, 97.8 percent of Meta's revenue was generated through advertising. Approximately 49.1 percent of Apple's revenue came from a single device, the iPhone. Amazon had the relatively speaking more diverse product portfolio, as only 36.9 percent of revenue came from it's strongest performing segment, Online Store Sales.

In 2024, global online platform Alphabet generated 350.02 billion U.S. dollars in revenues. Online retail company Amazon was ranked first with over 637 billion U.S. dollars in annual revenues, up from around 575 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year.

Global app downloads have plateaued in recent years, especially when comparing between the previous figures provided by data.ai and Sensor Tower. However, global downloads seemed to have recovered in 2025, reaching nearly 149 billion unique downloads.

The discrepancy arises from considerable differences in the methodology used by the sources to aggregate and generate the data. Sensor Tower reports only unique downloads per user account, excluding app updates, re-downloads, and installations on multiple devices by the same user. In contrast, data.ai includes these additional activities as well as downloads from third-party Android stores and a broader geographic scope, resulting in substantially higher total counts. As a result, Sensor Tower's numbers better reflect new user acquisition, while data.ai's encompass all market activity and total engagement.

While the number of downloads is leveling off, consumer spending on in-app purchases and related revenue has grown in 2025 to 167 billion U.S. dollars, up from around 130 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. While gaming remains the highest-grossing app category overall, other categories drove the growth. The entertainment, photo & video, productivity, and social networking categories each grew by at least one billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2025 compared to the previous year.

In August 2025, ChatGPT was top-grossing iPhone app in the Apple App Store worldwide, generating roughly 25 million U.S. dollars. 

MrBeast made the first place in the ranking of the most-subscribed YouTube channels in January 2026. With 451 million subscribers, the U.S. based videographer and internet personality managed to surpass Indian music network T-Series, which held the number one place for several years, and sat at 307 million subscribers as of the examined period.

YouTube was launched in 2005 as a platform for sharing user-generated videos such as vlogs, tutorials, or original series. The site grew rapidly and reportedly had 100 million video views per day and well over 65,000 daily uploads only a year later. As of February 2022, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute, up from a mere 24 hours of content uploads per minute in 2010.

In November 2022, MrBeast surpassed long-standing most subscribed YouTuber PewDiePie, having reached approximately 112 million subscribers. Due to the high number of subscribers and even higher number of views, these out-of-the-box stars not only have millions of fans but also considerable earnings from their YouTube activities. As of April 2025, MrBeast was estimated to have earned around 85 million U.S. dollars, topping the ranking of the highest-earning YouTube creators.