Social media's growth era is over, and the numbers now confirm it
A Financial Times analysis of 250,000 adults across more than 50 countries puts a hard date on the turn: 2022. Since then, usage has plateaued or declined, with younger users pulling back fastest. The attention economy is not expanding anymore.
Social media usage peaked in 2022. That is no longer a hypothesis. A Financial Times analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries tracked daily time spent on platforms from a high of 151 minutes in 2022 down to 143 minutes the following year and 141 minutes by the end of 2024, close to a 10 percent decline over two years. The youngest users are pulling back the fastest.
Steven Bartlett, citing the Financial Times report directly, frames the finding plainly: “2022 was the peak and it’s plateaued ever since. The generation that’s plateaued the fastest and heading down is the younger generations.” That data point matters because younger users have historically been the leading indicator of where platform attention flows next. When they retreat, the broader trend follows.
The saturation is visible at the creator level too. Cliff Weitzman notes that even Mr. Beast, whose scale of distribution dwarfs nearly any individual publisher, saw his highest YouTube views last year. This year, those numbers are coming down slightly. If the most algorithmically optimized creator operation on the platform is losing ground, the structural headwinds are not selective.
The average app installs per user per month is zero. Mark Pincus
Mark Pincus, approaching the same picture from the app economy, puts the stall in starker terms. The average number of app installs per user per month, he says, is zero. Of the roughly 40,000 new games launched last year in the App Store, none broke into the top 10, and none sustained a top-25 or top-50 ranking. The discovery machinery that once lifted new products into mass adoption has effectively stopped working for new entrants.
Jake Paul, whose observation comes from the inside of the creator economy, describes the closed loop this has created. He argues that at the highest level of social media, sustained presence has narrowed to himself, Mr. Beast, and his brother Logan, with essentially no new entrants breaking through to that tier. That is a strong claim, and it is his own framing of his own position. But it rhymes with Pincus’s data: the platforms are not minting new breakout successes the way they once did.
A Stanford neuroscientist speaking on the same trend sees the stall not as an endpoint but as a gap waiting to be filled. The prediction, for 2026, is that a market opportunity exists for a new social media company to emerge, precisely because awareness of the current platforms’ failure modes is now widespread. Whether that opening materializes is genuinely uncertain. What is not uncertain is the diagnosis behind it.
The attention economy’s growth assumption has quietly expired. Platforms, advertisers, and creators all built strategies on the premise that the pool of available human attention would keep expanding. The data from the Financial Times, corroborated by what individual builders and creators are observing at ground level, is that the pool stopped growing three years ago. The institutions and business models that depend on continued expansion have not yet reorganized around that fact. That gap, between the old assumption and the current reality, is where the real disruption is accumulating.