Social Media Seen Through the Eyes of App Annie – Part Two

In a recent article where we covered a report on the evolution of social media. The focus here is on discussing the scale at which social media is measured and the growing importance of streaming apps. We have also touched upon the topic of creators, and today we will focus mainly on markets.

App Annie has stated that by 2025, spending on social media apps will reach $78 billion! And the biggest market in terms of downloads is, as we would expect, the Asian market. This ranks as high as 60 percent. of all downloads in the first half of this year.

The report points to the huge importance of India, which overtook the Americans by as much as five times in 2018. The not-to-be-missed growth within India was also discussed in a Sensor Tower report. India is the leading market, having overtaken the U.S. five times, in 2018.

App Annie makes clear that mature markets are giving way to emerging ones. The observation of the USA and China on the podium with Indonesia and Brazil clearly indicate such a trend. This is puzzling because, knowing the consumer behaviors and habits of more developed countries, we are able to observe an ever-increasing demand for social apps.

The Big Three

It turns out that the podium does not remain a big surprise. The top three are the United States, Japan, and of course China. These particular countries, so far, account for 60 percent of. social app spending. It is interesting to note the declining share of the Japanese market in favor of the growing trend among Americans.

The United States became the largest market for consumer spending on social apps in the first half of this year, representing nearly a third of the total market driven by spending to support content creators and streamers.

Increasingly longer on social

App Annie proves that nearly 60 percent of. of global time spent on social media apps is generated by residents coming from Asia Pacific. Time spent on social media apps in India has grown unexpectedly in the last 3.5 years, leading to a narrowing gap between them and the Chinese. That difference was 115 percent in 2018, and now it’s less than 7 percent! Pakistan came in ahead of Mexico last year, putting it in sixth place in terms of users.

Interesting observation

Consumers prefer audio video applications, especially those with streaming capabilities and the so-called. shorts, which are short videos, usually up to 30 seconds long. Facebook and WhatsApp are still the most downloaded, although if we take consumer spending under the magnifying glass, TikTok with Youtube come out on top.

There is also a noticeable shift within content consumption, with consumers more absorbed by less professional content, but based on their personal experiences and relating to indicated preferences. These are the reasons why YouTube and TikTok are leading the way, as they offer the possibility of streaming video and their algorithms are developed enough to serve customized content to users.

Novelties like rewarding creators for their contribution, which further drives creation, also strongly influences the development of these apps and the spending that is done on them. Apart from Tik Tok, the power of gifting is used by Twitch and Bigo Live, which are among the top ten applications in terms of consumer spending.

The ranking clearly shows the typical winners when it comes to time spent on social, namely YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp, but the changing trends prove that they can shake before TikTok. The Chinese giant swept Messenger, Netflix and MX Player without much difficulty.

Although YouTube is and will probably for a long time remain the leader when it comes to streaming content to watch, using average calculations per all users Tik Tok is slowly beginning to surpass the content giant in the US or the UK for example.