The pace of change online is incredibly exciting.
But it’s also challenging keeping up with internet users’ shifting behaviour as new technologies develop, new platforms emerge, and new habits form.
We’ve used Ipsos iris to identify four key trends from last year, to help you better understand the online landscape and inform your planning for the year ahead.
AI Integration
It doesn’t take a clairvoyant – or an award-winning online audience measurement solution – to predict that AI will continue to grow in 2025.
But the data makes it almost impossible not to include. When we look at the top 500 online brands, no-one saw a bigger increase in audience (+143%) or time spent (+1,060%) between December 2023 and December 2024 than OpenAI.
Over that period, the ChatGPT app has been growing faster than the website, as AI shifts from something interesting to something integrated into users lives.
App users spend significantly longer on ChatGPT, and use it more frequently: they spent 72 minutes on the app in December 2024, compared to 27 minutes for site users. They did this across an average of 7.2 days, compared to 5.2 days for users of the ChatGPT site.
As AI becomes more embedded into solutions like search results, chatbots and media players, it will become increasingly difficult to measure just how much we’re interacting with it on a daily basis. However, ChatGPT provides a good bellwether for understanding the increasing reach and frequency of AI usage in the year ahead.
Politics affects platforms
Completists will know that X featured in our trends piece last year. For the first half of 2024 it looked like the ship had steadied, with monthly audience figures largely stable.
However, in the second half of the year, as Elon Musk became more involved in the US election, audience figures started to drop again, with monthly users down by 6% in December 2024 compared to the previous year.
While the rapid rise of Bluesky dominated headlines towards the end of the year, Threads has quietly been amassing users. Bluesky reached 3.0 million users in December 2024, compared to 8.4 million for Threads.
More significantly, the average time spent per person on each platform is increasingly healthy: 91 minutes in December for Bluesky, and 120 minutes for Threads. Both are still some way behind the 229 minutes average recorded by X users, but it looks like they will provide stronger competition as the year progresses.
The e-volution of e-commerce
Of the top 10 brands with the biggest audience growth in 2024, three of them are changing the way people shop: Shopify, Clearpay and Rakuten.
Shopify saw the biggest growth, with its monthly audience more than doubling from 9.2 million in December 2023, to 18.8 million in December 2024.
Its Shop brand is multi-faceted, with its site providing something of a directory for individual Shopify stores, while it also offers users a delivery tracking service and a payment platform for use on Shopify-supported outlets.
Both Clearpay (+81%) and Rakuten (+75%) also saw significant increases in audience over the same time period. Clearpay is a buy now, pay later payment platform – its monthly users overtook Klarna last year – while Rakuten has a cashback proposition.
So, three disparate brands, but all three are helping to disrupt the way people shop. All three also have the highest reach among internet users aged 25-34. We’ll see which brands manage to extend their reach into older demographics in the year ahead.
Socially mature audiences
Reddit was a beneficiary of changes to Google’s search algorithm last year, which contributed to a 50% increase in monthly users. The social media platform had 29.5 million users in December 2024, up from 19.7 million the previous year.
TikTok also had a strong year, with monthly users rising from 24.2 million to 28.5 million (+18%) over the same time period.
This growth means that both platforms now reach over half of all internet users, with both Reddit (+87%) and TikTok (+35%) seeing the greatest audience growth among over 55s.
It also means the two platforms share the same challenge, of driving higher engagement amongst these growing older audiences: the average 55+ user spends a fifth of the time that a 15-24 year does on Reddit, and a tenth of what they spend on TikTok.
Both platforms will keep growing in 2025, but we’ll be keeping an eye on who manages to achieve cross-generational engagement.
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