Hard to believe, but the places where the noise happens aren’t the places where the people are.
On the open web, Twitter is a decently busy pub, about 9% of UK social network website visits last month, while Facebook is still the Golden Coral buffet at ~69%. Instagram hovers near ~11%. That’s web traffic only, but it sets the tone for where links move and which platforms actually send people anywhere.
Shift from clicks to people and minutes to see the picture getting even starker.
Ofcom’s latest Online Nation report shows YouTube reaching roughly 94% of UK online adults, Facebook/Messenger about 91%, Instagram around 76%, and TikTok about 51%. Reddit is the unfashionable heavyweight with 48% reach, quietly overtaking Twitter, which sat around 47% and has been drifting down since 2021. WhatsApp is the phantom whale, reaching 87% of online adults and used daily by nearly 2/3 of them.
When I start any strategy, one of the first questions is where do the audience spend their time, what media do they consume, and why. If you’re not stacking your efforts against the minutes, you’re already starting at a disadvantage.
Surprise number two: YouTube isn’t just a phone app, it’s TV now.
Adults who spend ~47 minutes a day watching the platform, and 1/3 minutes of home TV viewing is now YouTube broadcast to a television, surreal to think about but while watching YouTube on a 72” TV, millions of people are second screening on their phone. For the next generation JJ, Mikey and other Minecraft content creators are as valid as TV presenters as Ant and Dec are to us.
In other corners of the web, Snapchat still soaks up ~55 minutes a day with 18–24s, while Quora, of all things, has quietly climbed out of the grave and now has ~31% reach. Neither is fashionable in newsrooms, yet both shape behaviour where it counts: in habit and search enriched discovery.
Remember when messaging was called D@rK S0c1@l and corps tried to chat up how to get people to talk to brands in it? It’s now the default. And while WhatsApp is the London Victoria of chat, the interesting action is happening in the side corridors. Telegram is small but growing, reaching about 3.4m UK adults in a typical month (around 7% reach). Signal is smaller again, roughly 1.2m (2%) but unusually sticky inside tight, trust‑heavy circles, with users averaging about 2 hours 24 minutes a month.
Neither is a mass news gateway in the UK, but both matter when mobilisation and coordination are the brief. During last summer’s unrest Telegram’s UK active users jumped by roughly a million before ebbing away again.
So, who actually moves the news? Ofcom’s 2025 update is blunt:
Half the country now uses social for news, and Facebook remains the single biggest social gateway at about 30% of adults. X still feels oversized because it’s the print and broadcast media’s control room and Westminster’s group chat, the public’s minutes, meanwhile, are piling up elsewhere.
Two yardsticks keep tripping people up, so let’s be clear:
StatCounter’s share of visits view is web only. Great for understanding where link clicks originate, weak for app first behaviour.
Ofcom/Ipsos iris measures apps + web, giving you reach and time by audience.
Look through both lenses and the picture stops lying: Reddit’s bigger than anyone in legacy media wants to admit, Snapchat’s still glued to Gen Z, WhatsApp is the pipe under the floorboards, YouTube is de facto television, and Facebook although unfashionable as it is, is still leviathan. Calibrate your column inches and media buys to where people and minutes actually are, not where hot takes echo.
If you want a heuristic that doesn’t age badly: bet on minutes, not memes.
That said though, Mash Gang built a business in Telegram channels and Instagram DMs. Places nobody would tell you was optimal for B2B business, so break the rules and do what you want, providing it works.