With numerous online platforms competing for attention, content creators face a crucial decision: which platform will best serve their content and their business needs? Understanding these choices is key for brands aiming to build preference over other platforms.
Leveraging Kantar’s Digital Analytics (Dx) toolkit, we tracked online discussions from 50 top UK content creators to understand their attitudes towards social platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X, and to identify the drivers of their preferences.
Key findings:
Our findings highlight the importance of several key factors influencing platform choice:
- Platform experience is the most important choice driver (39% share of voice). Creators' reliance on platforms means they are deeply affected by poor platform experiences, especially those impacting revenue, such as accusations of invalid traffic or frozen account payments.
- Revenue and monetisation are critical. Creators seek transparency and fairness when it comes to sharing the advertising revenue generated from their content. This mattered most to those who are less reliant on brand partnerships for income.
Source: Kantar Digital Analytics (Dx) | online mentions of social platforms from a sample of 50 content creators in the UK, January 2023 - February 2024
Platform comparisons:
We also found that drivers of choice varied between platforms - there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Key differentiators include:
- Instagram’s scale and sense of community drive higher positivity from creators than YouTube, TikTok and X. Content creators highlighted that Instagram is a crucial component of the platform mix (55% share of voice), valued for its large user base community building potential.
- YouTube was praised for its long-standing monetisation policies and generous fees versus competitors. While Instagram and TikTok were both acknowledged as a gateway to generating revenue through brand deals, they are criticised for the difficulty in monetising content and highlighted a lack of clarity from platforms in how to best monetise certain content formats like Reels.
Sources: Kantar Digital Analytics (Dx) | online mentions of social platforms from a sample of 50 content creators in the UK, January 2023 - February 2024 and Kantar Global Media Reaction 2023
Creators use social media as a forum to debate their platform strategies. Understanding their evolving choices is vital for platforms aiming to grow their user base and ad revenue. Our approach provides a simple and real-time way to monitor their preferences at scale and can be tailored to creators across different sectors. By combining insights from Kantar of the evolving consumer and marketers’ perception of different platforms, it will help platform providers evolve and provide services and offers that is relevant and unique to them.
Want to know more? Please get in touch with Winnie Cheng, Senior Commercial Strategy Director.