Strategic Intelligence: Social Media Sector Scorecard Q3 2024 Update

Q3 2024 saw governments and regulators reaching a stand-off with social media companies X and Telegram over the content published on their platforms. The arrest of Telegram's CEO Pavel Durov in France on charges of failing to act against criminals using the app was followed days later by Musk's X being blocked in Brazil after it had refused to ban several profiles deemed by the government to be spreading misinformation. The ban on X has since been lifted, and Durov has been released. However, the two incidents show that social media companies find themselves increasingly at odds with governments and regulators over the safety of their platforms.

Key Highlights

• The UK’s Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) impose unprecedented obligations on social media companies to protect underage internet users from harmful content. Meta is under fire over Instagram’s impact on young people and is facing a probe under the DSA. As a result, it rolled out changes allowing parents to set daily time limits on the app and block teens from using Instagram at night.
• TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube remain popular as users increase their video consumption. In particular, Instagram continues to grow in popularity in terms of viewer engagement and short-form videos, and in March 2024, it overtook TikTok as the most downloaded app. Meanwhile, the future of TikTok remains uncertain in the US following concerns about the Chinese influence and its ban in India (though similar apps, such as Moj, Chingari, and Josh, are emerging in the latter country).

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the social media sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst’s thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition, and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• At the analyst, we have developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• Our thematic engine tags over 180 million data items across six alternative data sets-patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news-to themes. The vast datasets within our thematic engine help our analysts to produce sector scorecards that identify the companies best placed to succeed in a future filled with multiple disruptive threats.