Platform demographics
Who is actually on each platform in 2026
Before judging any creator you need the baseline. Two free datasets do most of the work. If a creator's audience looks identical to the baseline, they have no audience advantage to sell you.
US adult platform use, Pew Research Center 2025
Pew Research Center, Americans' Social Media Use 2025, published 20 November 2025, from 5,022 US adults surveyed 5 February to 18 June 2025.
95 percent of 18 to 29s, 92 percent of 30 to 49s, 85 percent of 50 to 64s, 64 percent of over-65s.
Peaks at 80 percent among 30 to 49s, not among the youngest adults, where it reaches 68 percent.
80 percent of 18 to 29s, 62 percent of 30 to 49s, 40 percent of 50 to 64s, 19 percent of over-65s. Women 55, men 44.
63 percent of 18 to 29s, 44 percent of 30 to 49s, 30 percent of 50 to 64s, 12 percent of over-65s. Women 42, men 30.
Unusually flat by age: 37 percent of 18 to 29s against 40 percent of 30 to 49s.
India ad audience reach, DataReportal 2026
DataReportal Digital 2026: India, published 5 November 2025, using October 2025 figures from Kepios, GSMA Intelligence, Google and Meta advertising tools. TikTok is absent because India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology made the June 2020 ban permanent in January 2021.
1.03 billion people online at the end of 2025, a penetration rate of 70.0 percent.
500 million people. Adult audience 61.2 percent male, 38.8 percent female.
481 million people. Adult audience 69.7 percent male and 29.9 percent female, a far sharper male skew than the global split.
403 million people, 27.5 percent of the population.
500 million active identities in October 2025. Identities, not verified individual humans.
Four numbers that change how you read an audience file
Each comes from a named published study. When a creator or an agency quotes a statistic with no source line like these, treat it as marketing copy.
So a female-skewed Instagram audience in India is scarce and worth paying for, because the baseline runs roughly seven in ten male. In the United States the same claim is unremarkable, because Instagram already reaches 55 percent of women against 44 percent of men.
How to read an audience demographic report
Six checks, in order, on every media kit you receive. Most mismatches show up in the first three.
- 1Establish which population it measures
Meta's Instagram Platform API exposes follower_demographics, who follows the account, and engaged_audience_demographics, who interacted over 14, 30 or 90 days. Different people. A creator with a decayed follower base and a young, active engaged audience looks like two different creators depending on which they screenshot.
- 2Find out who is missing from the sample
Demographic data is never a census. YouTube's Analytics API defines its ageGroup dimension as identifying the age group of logged-in users, and gender the same way. Signed-out viewers are absent. Meta states the parallel limit: only viewers it holds demographic data for enter the calculation, so the breakdown will not reconcile with total reach.
- 3Separate what is measured from what is estimated
Anything a discovery tool shows about a creator you do not own is an estimate. Modash's documentation states that age and gender are estimated using image recognition and profile analysis on a statistical sample, and should be read as a strong indicator rather than exact numbers. A two-point gap is noise.
- 4Discount for accounts that are not people
DataReportal, which compiles the ad-reach figures this industry quotes, warns that platform audience numbers can include duplicate accounts, inauthentic accounts and legitimate non-human accounts such as pets, businesses and places of interest. Meta adds that estimated audience sizes are not designed to match population or census estimates.
- 5Compare against your buyer, not the platform average
You sell premium skincare in India to women aged 25 to 34. A creator reports an audience 62 percent male and 71 percent aged 18 to 24. Poor fit, yet still more female than the Indian Instagram baseline DataReportal records at 69.7 percent male. Benchmarking against the platform flatters everybody.
- 6Close the loop with first-party data
After the first collaboration, compare the demographics of people who clicked and bought against the profile you were sold. If the promised 25 to 34 female share was 48 percent but your purchasers skew younger and male, the audience file was wrong, the creative pulled a different segment, or both.
Platform-native data versus third-party estimatesData provenance
Sources: Meta's Instagram Platform API reference, the YouTube Analytics and Reporting API dimension definitions, and Modash help documentation. Neither column wins outright. They answer different questions and fail in different ways.
| Feature | Platform-native (creator shares it) | Third-party tool (vendor estimates it) |
|---|---|---|
| Where age and gender come from | ||
| Minimum size before data appears | ||
| Known coverage gap | ||
| Fake and inactive followers | ||
| Geographic detail |
| Feature | Platform-native (creator shares it) |
|---|---|
| Where age and gender come from | |
| Minimum size before data appears | |
| Known coverage gap | |
| Fake and inactive followers | |
| Geographic detail |
Six signs the audience does not match your buyer
Each is checkable in under ten minutes from a media kit and a public profile.
The gender split mirrors the platform
No advantage to buy An Indian Instagram creator reporting roughly 70 percent male is showing you the national baseline DataReportal recorded for late 2025, not an audience they built. Selling to women, insist on a split that differs materially from it.
Top locations sit outside your market
Reach you cannot serve Location rows are truncated on every reporting surface, so a top-five city list hides a long tail. Ask for country share first, then city. If a fifth of the audience sits outside the market you serve, real cost per reachable person is much higher.
The audience is younger than your buyer
Attention without wallets Pew Research Center's December 2025 teens study found roughly six in ten US teenagers aged 13 to 17 use TikTok and Instagram, and about one in five are on TikTok or YouTube almost constantly. YouTube also limits demographic reporting on Made for Kids content.
Comment language contradicts the report
Free sanity check Read fifty recent comments. If the report claims 80 percent India but comment languages and handles skew elsewhere, the estimate has drifted. Cheapest cross-check there is, and it catches inherited or purchased followings.
Followers grew but engaged demographics did not
Growth without people Ask for engaged audience demographics over two windows, the last 30 days against the last 90. Real growth into a new age band or city moves those numbers. A follower jump with a frozen engaged profile is a warning.
Round numbers and no source line
Copy, not data Genuine exports produce untidy figures. A deck claiming a clean 70 percent female, 30 percent male and 60 percent aged 25 to 34, with no screenshot, no window and no tool named, has been typed rather than exported.
Acting on the data
What to change in the brief when the audience skews
Selected work from the Dcrayon team
Real client engagements from our published case study library.
+3,400%
Sales Increase on Amazon India
GetSetNova
GetSetNova lifted sales 3,400 percent on Amazon India and earned Amazon Bestseller badges in 3 separate product categories. Both outcomes verified...
180%
More Revenue
Keratine Professional
The account moved from consistent-but-limited to explosive growth. Ordered product sales grew from Rs 1.82 crore to Rs 5.10 crore, order items from...
+400%
Top 5 Keyword Rankings
Proven Water Industries Pvt Ltd
Proven Water reached rank 5 organic on the primary category keyword on Amazon India, the headline proof point of the engagement. A+ content and key...
+143%
Speed Improvement
McCormick & Company
Within one sprint cycle, desktop Google PageSpeed Insights score rose from 35 to 85 — a 143% improvement. Mobile score moved from below 40 to 75. C...
100% logged
Audit Trail
Round Glass
The automation eliminated 100% of the manual provisioning workload for IT on each hire and exit cycle. New employees had their Azure accounts, emai...
24h
Order dispatch
GRYT Health Labs
The launched site reads as a focused, conversion-first shop rather than a catalogue dump. Because it is a custom Laravel build, the cart, checkout...
Daddy of Tastes
The launched storefront gives customers a quick path from category to dish detail to cart, with offers and ratings visible where they aid the decis...
Instacertify
The site reads as a single command center for certification, with search and clear calls to action giving buyers an obvious first step. The card-dr...
Northern Tile Distributors
The storefront gives Northern Tile Distributors a clean way to present deep tile and timber ranges so builders can scan collections quickly and che...
Raa Logistics
The launched site gives Raa Logistics a clean, professional presence that reads well on both desktop and phones, with the quote request and trackin...
Audience data questions brands ask
Because demographic data exists only for part of the audience. Meta's Instagram Platform API documentation states that only viewers it holds demographic data for are used in demographic metric calculations. YouTube's Analytics API defines its age and gender dimensions as covering logged-in users, so signed-out viewers are excluded.
Directionally useful, not precise. Modash's documentation states that age and gender are estimated using image recognition and profile analysis on a statistical sample and should be treated as a strong indicator rather than exact numbers. Rank a shortlist with them, then verify your final creators against the platform-native panel.
Access, age and platform mix. The GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2025 puts the mobile internet gender gap in South Asia at 32 percent, the widest of any region. DataReportal's Digital 2026: India report puts Instagram's adult ad audience there at 69.7 percent male and 29.9 percent female. India's median age is 28.8, and TikTok has been banned since June 2020.
No. DataReportal cautions that these figures may include duplicate accounts, inauthentic accounts and legitimate non-human accounts such as pets, businesses and places of interest, and that ad reach is not a direct proxy for a platform's user base. Meta says estimated audience sizes are not designed to match population or census estimates.
A live screen share of the analytics panel rather than an image. Follower demographics and engaged audience demographics separately, with the window stated. Country share before city share. And the same export for two windows, so you can see whether the audience is moving.
It dilutes it. If three creators in one niche share a large slice of the same followers, you pay three times to reach one person while part of your target never sees the campaign. Where you cannot measure overlap directly, mixing categories, cities and languages across the roster is the practical workaround.
Send us a creator shortlist
Share the creators you are considering and the buyer you want to reach. We will review the audience data and tell you what it supports.
Get a free audience audit from Dcrayon
Send us the audience files you have been handed. A named lead on our Delhi team will check the provenance of every figure, benchmark it against published platform baselines, and give you a plain answer on fit.