Digital behavior research
What do people do online?
Start with the activity, then keep the population and question with the number.
Different activities. Overlapping audiences.
In November 2023, 72.8% of U.S. internet users aged 15+ were reported as watching videos online, 66.1% as making internet video or voice calls, and 62.1% as streaming or downloading music, radio or podcasts.
NTIA asks about at least occasional activity in the prior six months. These percentages describe people already using the internet; they do not measure all adults, subscribers or daily active accounts.
Source: NTIA / U.S. Census Bureau Analyze Table, November 2023, adultInternetUser. Latest actual activity wave in the checked source; a later survey announcement is not a released estimate.
United States · Internet users aged 15+ · November 2023
Source: NTIA original aggregates. Each bar has its own question; activities overlap and cannot be summed as unique users.
View figures and source standard errors
| Activity | Share (%) | SE (pp) |
|---|---|---|
| Social-network use | 76.3696 | 0.2645 |
| Texting or instant messaging | 95.0649 | 0.1303 |
| Watching videos online | 72.8196 | 0.2853 |
| Internet video or voice calls | 66.1240 | 0.3203 |
| Online music, radio and podcasts | 62.0944 | 0.3221 |
SE means sampling standard error in percentage points, not a confidence interval. Differences between activities are descriptive, not significance tests.
Three activities, examined closely
Social networks and messaging remain distinct
The same survey reports social-network use and texting or instant messaging as separate activities. A person can do both. The available tables cannot identify a messaging-only audience or how much the activities overlap.
For a named platform, use its separately scoped evidence: YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. A service named as an example in an NTIA question does not receive its own estimate.
Internet adoption comes before activity
Country profiles use World Bank / ITU’s Individuals using the Internet indicator. This is a separate population-based measure of internet use, with country/year scope exceptions. It is not social-network participation and cannot be multiplied by the NTIA activity percentages to create a country audience count.
Source: World Bank WDI / ITU, IT.NET.USER.ZS. Latest non-missing year for these four profiles is 2024; 2025 cells are missing. No country ranking or cross-year growth calculation is offered.
Trace the evidence
Data Commons helps discover and check published observations. Original NTIA documentation resolves an entity-label mismatch in its graph, so the activity percentages here come from NTIA’s own table. Our historical charts show dated observations with question and method cautions, rather than an uninterrupted comparable trend.
Snapshot digital-behavior-2026-10-08-v1 · Assisted source review 2026-10-08. Source periods are shown separately from review dates.