It’s really good to own a social media company, whether it be Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or even one of the lesser known. These firms collectively brought in $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S.-based users under the age of 18 in 2022 alone, according to a new study released by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
This should come as little surprise for most people considering how the youngest people in America have always driven the country’s advertising and entertainment industries. These are the people with both free time on their hands and money to spend. And with social media, they can find entertainment for free.
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Kids these days can spend all day long on their mobile devices watching videos and looking at pictures and texts posted by friends and celebrities alike. The social media platforms then make a fortune by placing targeted advertisements among their millions of posts. And they don’t even need to worry about click through rates or anything like that.
The researchers say that their study is the first to offer estimates of the number of youth users on these platforms and how much annual ad revenue is attributable to them.
“As concerns about youth mental health grow, more and more policymakers are trying to introduce legislation to curtail social media platform practices that may drive depression, anxiety, and disordered eating in young people,” said senior author Bryn Austin, professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
“Although social media platforms may claim that they can self-regulate their practices to reduce the harm to young people,” he added, “they have yet to do so, and our study suggests they have overwhelming financial incentives to continue to delay taking meaningful steps to protect children.”
The researchers used a variety of public survey and market research data from 2021 and 2022 to “comprehensively” estimate Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, and YouTube’s number of youth users and related ad revenue. Population data from the U.S. Census and survey data from Common Sense Media and Pew Research were used to estimate the number people younger than 18 using these platforms in the U.S. Data from eMarketer, a market research company, and Qustodio, a parental control app, provided estimations of each platform’s projected gross ad revenue in 2022 and users’ average minutes per day on each platform.
The researchers said they used these estimations to build a simulation model that estimated how much ad revenue the platforms earned from young U.S. users.
According to their research, YouTube led the world of social media in ad revenue revenue from users 12 and under bringing in $959.1 million. Second was Instagram with $801.1 million and then Facebook with $137.2 million.
Instagram derived the greatest ad revenue from users ages 13-17 with $4 billion, followed by TikTok at $2 billion.
“Our finding that social media platforms generate substantial advertising revenue from youth highlights the need for greater data transparency as well as public health interventions and government regulations,” said lead author Amanda Raffoul, instructor in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
