About half of the world's population is active on social media. Of the 4.5 billion global Internet users, 3.8 billion people have an account on a platform. With efforts to make the world wide web accessible to even more people and the prospect of a billion new Internet users in the coming years, this number will only increase.

The social media universe looks like an American-Chinese game with five odds each, based on the number of monthly users. Visual Capitalists maps out the entire playing field. The biggest four platforms come from the US. Facebook (2.6 billion), WhatsApp (2 billion), YouTube (2 billion) and Messenger (1.3 billion) are in place one to four, followed by Chinese WeChat (1.2 billion) in fifth place.

The Russian Telegram is the first non-US or China platform and is in the twelfth place with four hundred million monthly users.

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This is the social media universe, where American and Chinese companies are the service - MT.com