"Over the past twelve months, the world’s digital behaviours have shown some of the most profound changes we’ve seen in years, even compared with “the pandemic years”. And in fact, our top story in this year’s report doesn’t relate to digital growth, but to an overall decline in the amou ... nt of time that each individual spends using the internet. It’s important to stress that this decline doesn’t indicate that the internet is becoming less important in our lives, however. Rather, it suggests that people are becoming more purposeful in their use of digital technologies, and are prioritising the quality of their connected experiences over the quantity. Despite the decline in overall time spent, however, people are actually spending more time than ever using social media, and in stark contradiction to the endless click-bait foretelling an imminent “demise” of social media, global user numbers continue to grow." (Page 3) more

"Overall digital growth has slowed over recent years, but this is to be expected as internet users reach “supermajority” status. However, while almost two thirds of the world’s total population is now online, 2.7 billion people remain “unconnected” at the start of 2024, and adoption rates ... across Sub-Saharan Africa remain well below 50 percent. But user growth isn’t the only indicator of digital progress, and our extensive collection of behavioural data also reveals important findings. In particular, it’s interesting to see that the amount of time that people spend online has increased again this year, following the declines that we reported in 2023. It’s a different story for TV though, with the latest data suggesting that global viewing times have been declining steadily over recent months. We’re also seeing some intriguing changes in the world’s social media behaviours. TikTok continues its rapid ascent, with the platform’s reach and average time per user seeing impressive gains over the past year. Meanwhile, Instagram has overtaken WhatsApp to become the world’s “favourite” social platform, and Facebook continues to grow, in stark contrast to click-bait headlines. The top platforms aren’t the only ones enjoying strong growth though, and our newly expanded social media dataset reveals some valuable insights into LinkedIn, Snapchat, Weibo, Kuaishou, and Discord. Similarly, an exploration of the use of hashtags across platforms reveals some fascinating insights into the interests and motivations of the world’s social media users." (Page 3) more