TikTok is steamrolling past Instagram in user attention time, but is still far behind on ad dollars
- 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.
According to a new report released this week by Insider Intelligence, our company’s research arm, US adults are spending significantly more time scrolling on TikTok than Instagram this year.
TikTok users aged 18 and up in the United States are expected to spend a total of 4.43 billion minutes per day on the app in 2023, compared to 3.91 billion daily minutes on Instagram.
TikTok’s attention-time advantage is notable, given that the app has far fewer users than Instagram. According to Insider Intelligence, TikTok will have 82.3 million monthly adult users in the United States this year, compared to 118.4 million on Instagram. TikTok announced in March that it had 150 million monthly active users in the United States across all age groups. In October, Instagram owner Meta Platforms reported that the platform had over 2 billion monthly users worldwide, but did not break out its US audience.
Instagram’s larger scale and ties to Facebook and other Meta-owned apps have allowed it to keep advertising spend well ahead of TikTok. According to Insider Intelligence, the company is expected to earn roughly six times as much as TikTok in ad dollars per adult user for each hour spent on the apps in 2023.
“Instagram is part of Meta, and advertisers are still really wedded to Meta,” said Insider Intelligence principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “TikTok is good and definitely growing — they’re leaning into shopping and more performance-based advertising — but it’s still not up to par with what Meta offers.”
TikTok, as a relative newcomer, is likely to gain a foothold in ad spend in the coming months as it adds more users, increases attention time, and develops products to attract more marketers.
Between 2019 and 2023, total daily time spent on TikTok among US adults increased by approximately 547%, compared to 57% growth for Instagram. However, Instagram may be able to withstand a TikTok surge as its competitor product, reels, continues to drive views.
In July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that reels plays on Facebook and Instagram exceeded 200 billion per day, with an annual revenue run rate exceeding $10 billion.
Reels are “really cannibalizing time on other services on Instagram or feed,” according to Williamson. “We’re not necessarily seeing increased overall time on Instagram as a result of reels — people are simply spending a similar slightly increasing amount of time on Instagram every year, and reels are just part of that.”
“Reels is definitely gaining traction with advertisers and users now, but it still appears to be trailing TikTok,” Williamson added.
Between 2019 and 2023, most social-media and entertainment apps saw a significant increase in attention time as the COVID-19 pandemic drove 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 assumed that this would not continue, and that once the pandemic was over, people would return to their normal daily activities and spend less time on social media.” But, at the same time as the pandemic was spreading, TikTok began to take off, and video became more popular.”
When it came to attention time, however, neither TikTok nor Instagram were the most dominant social-entertainment apps. In Insider Intelligence’s analysis, YouTube dwarfed the two companies, generating 4.5 billion more minutes of watch time per day than TikTok.
According to Insider Intelligence, it analyzes around 4,926 metrics from 231 sources, including surveys, data from web and mobile activity tracking services, government data, and conversations with industry experts, to determine time spent for US media apps.
Here are three key findings from Insider Intelligence’s report:
- Time spent on social media is increasing across the board. According to Insider Intelligence, daily time spent on TikTok in the United States is expected to increase by 547% from 2019. However, several other apps have also seen increases. Instagram’s overall time-spend is expected to increase by 57% between 2019 and 2023, while apps such as Snapchat (29% increase), X, formerly Twitter (37% increase), and Reddit (119% increase) are expected to see smaller increases. Time spent on Facebook, on the other hand, is expected to fall by about 2% in 2019.
- When it comes to US ad spending, Instagram and Facebook outperform TikTok because Meta is the gold standard for social-media ad buys. According to Insider Intelligence’s report, ad spending on Instagram — measured per hour spent per adult — was roughly six times higher in 2023 than it was on TikTok. Facebook was roughly five times larger. Williamson described Meta’s advertising tools as “as simple as checking a box,” adding that advertisers can easily push content across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.
- Don’t overlook YouTube. While Insider Intelligence compared TikTok to Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube continues to outnumber TikTok in total minutes spent on the app. Yes, longer videos on the Google-owned platform are to blame. According to Insider Intelligence, YouTube will have approximately 9 billion daily minutes spent on the platform by 2023. However, in terms of platform size, “TikTok users spend more time per day on TikTok than YouTube users spend on YouTube,” the report concluded. TikTok’s new payment program encourages users to upload longer videos to its app.
