- TikTok has surpassed Instagram in daily minutes spent on the app — by 2025, it could pass Facebook.
- Insider Intelligence published a report breaking down time spent by US adults on social media.
- Here are 3 takeaways from the report, including how ad spend on Instagram still trumps TikTok.
US adults are spending a lot more time scrolling on TikTok than Instagram this year, per a new report released this week by Insider Intelligence, our company’s research arm.
On average, US TikTok users over the age of 18 are projected to spend a total of 4.43 billion minutes a day on the app in 2023, compared with 3.91 billion daily minutes on Instagram.
TikTok’s attention-time edge is notable, as the app has far fewer users than Instagram overall. Insider Intelligence estimated that TikTok will have 82.3 million monthly adult users in the US this year, compared to 118.4 million on Instagram. TikTok said in March that, overall, it had 150 million monthly active users in the US across all age groups. Instagram-owner Meta Platforms tallied over 2 billion monthly users worldwide for Instagram in October, but did not break out its US audience.
Instagram’s greater scale and ties to Facebook and other Meta-owned apps have helped it stay well ahead of TikTok in advertising spend. In 2023, the company is projected to earn around six times as much as TikTok in ad dollars per adult user for each hour spent on the apps, Insider Intelligence reported.
“Instagram is part of Meta and advertisers are still really wedded to Meta,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “TikTok is good and it’s definitely growing — they’re leaning into shopping and they’re leaning into more performance-based advertising — but it is still not up to par with what Meta offers.”
As a relative newcomer, TikTok is likely to gain ground on ad spend in the coming months as it adds more users, boosts attention time, and builds products to court more marketers.
Average daily time spent on TikTok among US adults jumped around 547% between 2019 and 2023, compared to 57% growth for Instagram. But Instagram could also fend off a TikTok surge as its competitor product, reels, continues to drive views.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July that reels plays exceeded 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram, with an annual revenue run rate exceeding $10 billion.
Reels are “really cannibalizing time on other services on Instagram or feed,” Williamson said. “We’re not necessarily seeing overall time on Instagram increasing because of reels — people are just spending a similar slightly growing amount of time every year, and reels is just part of that.”
“Reels is definitely getting more traction both with advertisers and with users now, but it still seems like it’s very far behind TikTok,” Williamson added.
Most social-media and entertainment apps saw a big bump in attention time between 2019 and 2023 as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed more Americans online.
“We saw a pretty substantial increase in time spent on social right at the start of the pandemic,” Williamson said. “We initially thought that that was not going to continue and that once the pandemic ended, people would go back and do their normal everyday activities and not spend as much time on social. But what ended up happening at the same time the pandemic was going on, was TikTok started to take off and video became a bigger thing.”
Neither TikTok nor Instagram were the most dominant among all social-entertainment apps when it came to attention time, however. YouTube dwarfed the two companies in Insider Intelligence’s analysis, driving 4.5 billion more minutes of watch time per day compared to TikTok.
Insider Intelligence said that it measures time spent for US media apps by analyzing around 4,926 metrics across 231 sources, including surveys, data from web and mobile activity tracking services, government data, and conversations with industry experts.
Here are 3 takeaways from Insider Intelligence’s report:
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Time spent on social media — across the board — is on the rise. While 2023 daily time spent on TikTok in the US is projected to balloon by 547% from 2019, according to Insider Intelligence, several other apps have also seen spikes. Instagram’s overall time-spend is expected to increase by 57% between 2019 and 2023, for instance, and apps like Snapchat (29% increase); X, formerly Twitter (37% increase); and Reddit (119% increase), also saw smaller projected increases. Time spent on Facebook, however, is projected to decrease by about 2% from 2019.
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Instagram and Facebook trump TikTok when it comes to US ad spending because Meta is the gold standard for social-media ad buys. For instance, ad spending on Instagram — measured per hour spent per adult — was about six times greater than it was on TikTok for 2023, according to Insider Intelligence’s report. Facebook was about five times greater. Meta’s advertising tools are as “easy as checking a box,” Williamson said, adding that it’s a straightforward process for advertisers to push content across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.
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Don’t forget about YouTube. While Insider Intelligence focused on comparing TikTok to Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube is still crushing TikTok in terms of total minutes spent on the app. And yes, that’s partially due to longer videos on the Google-owned platform. YouTube is expected to amass about 9 billion daily minutes spent on the platform in 2023, according to Insider Intelligence forecasts. Proportionately when it comes to the size of the platforms, however, “TikTok users spend more time per day on TikTok than YouTube users spend on YouTube,” the report concluded. TikTok is encouraging users to upload longer videos to its app through a new payment program.
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