Introduction

Young people are using social media more than ever [1]. One public research study found that, as of 2022, nearly half of adolescents reported being online “almost constantly,” up from 24% in 2015 [2]. A growing body of research documents associations between social media use, social media advertising, and negative mental health outcomes among youth, including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders [3–5].

However, despite the potential risks of social media for youth mental health, under current U.S. law, social media platforms have no legal obligation to release data surrounding the types of content youth are exposed to, nor the impacts of such content [6]. The lack of transparency among social media platform practices and the platforms’ reluctance to share data with researchers and journalists has been well-documented [7–9].

Social media platforms are highly incentivized to keep youth online–children and adolescents’ online experiences are heavily monetized through advertising revenue on platforms’ websites and mobile applications [10, 11]. Platforms draw upon highly personalized computational advertising to match users’ specific demographics and usage patterns with advertisers’ financial interests [12]. Although computational advertising may pose benefits to consumers, there are ethical concerns regarding the amount of data it may require from vulnerable users, such as youth. Since regulatory agencies do not hold social media platforms sufficiently accountable for their engagement with, collection of data for, and effects of advertising on children and adolescents [6], they are not required to report advertising revenue nor the age breakdown of users.

In this study, we obtained data from a business marketing source and from public survey data to conduct a novel simulation analysis to provide the first known estimates of the number of users and the annual advertising revenue generated from U.S.-based child users (ages 0–12 years) and adolescent users (ages 13–17 years) for six major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube) in 2022.

Methods

Results

Estimated number of youth users across major social media platforms

For each of the six major social media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube), we present model estimates for the number of youth users in the U.S. in Table 1. In 2022, among children ages 0–12 years and adolescents ages 13–17 years, the most popular platform was YouTube, which had nearly 31.5 and 18.4 million users, respectively, in these age groups. The least popular platforms among youth were Twitter and Facebook, which had approximately 7 million and 9.9 million users ages 0–17 years. Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok had an average of nearly 18 million users under the age of 18 years.

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Table 1. Estimated number of U.S.-based youth users of six social media platforms, by age group, 2022.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295337.t001

Estimated advertising revenue generated from youth users across major social media platforms

The age-specific advertising annual revenue derived from youth ages 0–12, 13–17, and 0–17 years from 2022 is presented in Fig 1. The greatest advertising revenue profits derived children ages 0–12 years old was from YouTube ($959.1 million), followed by Instagram ($801.1 million) and Facebook ($137.2 million). Among youth ages 13–17 years old, the greatest estimated advertising revenue was generated on Instagram ($4 billion), TikTok ($2 billion), and YouTube ($1.2 billion).

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Fig 1. Estimated annual U.S. advertising revenue from users under 18 years of age across social media platforms, 2022.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295337.g001

The estimated percentage of total advertising revenue derived from users of each platform, separated by age group, are presented in Fig 2. On Snapchat, nearly half (41.4%) of overall advertising revenue in 2022 is estimated to be derived from youth ages 0–17 years, followed by 35% on TikTok, 27% on YouTube, and 16% on Instagram. The revenue derived from youth under 18 years is comparatively low for Facebook and Twitter, where the estimated percent of total annual advertising revenue generated from users ages 0–17 years are 1.9% and 2.0%, respectively. This is likely due to the low number of youth users on each of these platforms relative to adult users (see Table 1).

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Fig 2. Estimated annual percent of total U.S. advertising revenue from users under 18 years of age across social media platforms, 2022.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295337.g002

Discussion

This is the first known study to estimate social media platform-specific advertising revenue from youth. Across the six major social media platforms, annual advertising revenue from children in the U.S. ages 0–12 years is over $2 billion USD and from all youth ages 0–17 years is nearly $11 billion. Approximately 30–40% of the advertising revenue generated from three social media platforms (Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube) is attributable to young people. Government efforts to update protections for children and adolescents have largely failed, facing substantial resistance from industry, and our findings underscore the financial incentive for platforms to oppose government efforts to protect youth.

Given the rise in social media use among youth during the COVID-19 pandemic [17], there has been growing interest in federal and state-level government regulation of platforms’ access to youth. One recent bill, the Kids Online Safety Act (S.1409, https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409) aims to bolster protections for youth on social media and increase the minimum permissible age of behavioral data collection by platforms, which drives computational advertising practices, to 16 years of age. The Kids Online Safety Act also includes parameters requiring platforms to make data available to researchers, which would vastly improve transparency and improve inquiries into the harms that social media poses to youth. Greater transparency in platform data sharing will allow researchers to obtain reliable estimates for not only advertising revenue, but also user demographics as well as behavioral data relevant to mental health risks associated with social media use.

There were several limitations to our study methods and analysis. We heavily relied upon secondary estimated and projected data, as well as the assumption that youth and adults may see a similar number of advertisements; however, as previously described, social media platforms do not publicly disclose any data on user base ages, nor the advertising revenue generated from them. The reliance on eMarketer presents additional challenges considering the company does not publicly disclose the methods it uses for estimated projected revenue, but we have tried to ameliorate the lack of transparency by providing eMarketer estimates in S2–S4 Tables. To our knowledge, there are no other sources of data that provide the number of child and adolescent users on each platform nor advertising revenue estimates. Our simulation methods offer the most rigorous estimates to date and can be updated as more data are made available.

Future research should investigate the potential health risks of social media-based advertising to youth in the U.S., as has been done in other countries for general media [18], and how influencer-sponsored posts strategically target youth through social media platforms [19]. Researchers and policymakers should also continue to seek alternative sources of data to address the current gaps in publicly available information.

Conclusions

We undertook this study to inform health researchers and policymakers about how much revenue is generated from youth users and how many children and adolescents actively use the major social media platforms, with a goal to inspire greater data transparency and political will to protect young people online. Our estimates suggest that social media platforms derive considerable profits from youth users, emphasizing the need for greater transparency and regulation of their practices to ameliorate potential harms to youth mental health.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Ariel Beccia, PhD (Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital) for her role in reviewing the analysis coding.