Report: 65% of US adults now use social networking sites, up from 7% a decade earlier
Social Media Usage: 2005-2015 — 65% of adults now use social networking sites - a nearly tenfold jump in the past decade — Nearly two-thirds of American adults (65%) use social networking sites …
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew's decade-long tracking series reaches a milestone with this Social Media Usage 2005-2015 report: what was a 7% niche activity in 2005 is now used by nearly two-thirds of American adults. The series had already documented adjacent behavior going mainstream, including dating site usage tripling among 18- to 24-year-olds since 2013.
What makes this reading matter is where the curve goes next: follow-up Pew work shows usage among people aged 50+ accelerating (55% now get news on social sites, up ten points year over year) before the overall adoption line finally flattens at 69% in Pew's 2018 survey.
First-order effects
- Social networking is no longer a young-user product: with 65% of all US adults on these sites, platform audiences now span the full adult demographic range, including the older cohorts that later drove Pew's news-on-social numbers.
Second-order effects
- News distribution follows the audience — Pew's subsequent surveys show a majority of older users getting news on social platforms and half of Facebook news users relying on that single site, shifting publishers' distribution dependence onto one or two dominant networks.
Third-order effects
- Once adoption saturates, growth moves from acquisition to depth: Pew's own later data shows internet (89%), smartphone (77%), and social media (69%) usage plateauing after 2016, meaning competition shifts to share of attention and multi-platform habits rather than new users.
The trend: Social networking completed its move from niche to mainstream infrastructure between 2005 and 2015, and the industry's center of gravity has since shifted from adding users to competing for their time and news habits.