The award for “the app teens are most likely to use on a daily basis” goes to YouTube, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center.
YouTube is visited daily by 73% of American teens age 13-17, easily topping the next closest competitor, TikTok, which 57% of respondents said they use on a daily basis. Instagram grabbed the bronze medal, with 50% of teens saying they use it each day.
Those results make “YouTube the most widely used and visited platform we asked about. This share includes 15% who describe their use as ‘almost constant,’ Pew said in its write-up on the survey.
The 73% of teens who said they use YouTube — which is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet — represented a slight increase from last year, when 71% of respondents said they visited the video platform each day; TikTok’s daily usage was flat year-over-year, while Instagram moved up slightly from 47% to 50% of respondents saying they used it on a daily basis.
Snapchat remained another popular app for teens, with 48% of respondents saying they use it daily — representing a slight dip from last year.
What are teens not using? Facebook and X. Teen usage on both platforms has “steeply declined” in the last decade, according to Pew.
Less than one-third of teens say they use Facebook occasionally — down from 71% in 2014-15 — and only 20% said they use the Meta-owned platform on a daily basis. (Fortunately for Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, the company also owns Instagram.)
X, meanwhile, is only used daily by 17% of teens — which is nearly half the share it had a decade ago (33%). Elon Musk’s app has seen a wave of left-leaning users flea for Bluesky since Election Day, but it’s daily usage in the U.S. has remained steady thanks to new users signing up.
Looking ahead to 2025, it’ll be interesting to see which apps benefit the most if TikTok is banned from the U.S. The popular app, owned by Beijing-based Bytedance, is set to be booted from the States on January 19 unless it can sell its American operation; one Wall Street analyst told TheWrap this week it’d likely cost a record-setting $300 billion to get a deal done. If a deal isn’t reached, the app still could be saved by president-elect Donald Trump, who said earlier this year he’d like to “save” TikTok.
