Facebook for those over 40, Instagram for those between 20 and 30 and TikTok for teenagers: these are the best known social networks, the ones we all more or less know. And yet, the ranking of the most popular ones at the beginning of 2021 returns a snapshot of the situation at times unexpected.
Because they are in the top positions sites not very common, or in any case not common as social, which between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 probably benefited from a popularity boost also linked to the coronavirus pandemic, lockdowns and the increased amount of time spent indoors.
This is definitely the case with YouTube, which in January 2021 had nearly 2.3 billion active users and it has seen its popularity grow tremendously precisely because in quarantine periods it has somehow replaced television. Google’s video upload platform is second in a ranking dominated by Facebook (over 2.7 billion active users): Zuckerberg’s social network, if it suffers from competition from rivals as a source of news, definitely does not accuse défaillance in terms of subscribers and monthly users.
What about the rest? The rest is split between WhatsApp and Messenger, which have gone far beyond their role as messaging apps, Instagram and TikTok, which is only in seventh position. but in the following months it grew a lot in popularity. The surprises are the Chinese social networks, like WeChat and Weibo, Reddit (little used in Europe but a lot in the USA), the stainless Pinterest and also Quora, the social where to do questions and have answers. Which was evidently one of the things people needed most in the difficult months of the pandemic.
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