Young people use TikTok to follow people they know and YouTube to follow what they watch. That is what Dubit's study of 3,009 households in the US and UK found. Among 1,145 young people who use both, 44.3% follow friends on TikTok against 29.5% on YouTube. On YouTube, 39.2% follow gamers and 29.2% follow TV channels, against 29.8% and 19.6% on TikTok.1
The same split shows in what each platform's users follow. Among 1,227 TikTok users, friends (43.3%) and family (31.9%) are the two most-followed account types, just ahead of influencers and creators on 31.8%. On YouTube the order runs the other way. Gamers on 30.6%, TV channels on 27.1% and educational content on 22.8% lead, with friends on 19.9%.
Retail brands and food and drink brands are followed at almost the same rate on both. Among young people who use both platforms, TikTok's rates for retail brands and food and drink brands index at 99 and 98, with YouTube's rate at 100. Friends index at 150 and family members at 151, while TV channels and educational channels index at 67. Family is followed by 32.8% on TikTok and 21.7% on YouTube, and educational channels by 23.9% on YouTube and 15.9% on TikTok. How friend-following on each platform changes with age is on our page about when young people start using social media features.
How do young people share content with each other?
Mostly face to face: across the study's full sample of 3,009, 48.2% share content in person and 33.7% share it digitally.2 That breaks down into 30.0% who share only face to face, 15.5% who share only digitally and 18.2% who do both.
Among the 580 who use both TikTok and YouTube every day, sharing on TikTok is more common than either kind of in-person sharing. Of that group, 46.2% share on TikTok, 40.3% share face to face outside school and 39.0% inside it, and only 8.1% do not share at all. Daily YouTube users who do not use TikTok share less. Of them, 29.3% (207 of 707) do not share at all, and 8.5% share on WhatsApp, 6.4% on Instagram and 2.8% on Snapchat. Among WhatsApp users, 12.0% do not share at all, against 26.8% of those who do not use WhatsApp.
TikTok video watchers share more on other platforms too. The study compared 855 TikTok video watchers with 1,632 YouTube video watchers. On Instagram, 19.1% of TikTok watchers share, against 10.4% of YouTube watchers. The figures are 18.6% against 9.0% on Snapchat, 20.5% against 13.1% on WhatsApp and 20.7% against 12.3% on Facebook.
Does a parent distrusting TikTok stop a teenager using it?
Mostly it stops them starting. Among 13 to 15 year olds whose parents distrust TikTok, 29.0% have never used it, against 1.7% of those whose parents trust it.3 Daily use is still common: 47.1% of the 13 to 15 year olds with distrusting parents use TikTok every day, against 74.9% of those with trusting parents.
At the same age, daily TikTok use is level whether or not a parent values monitoring tools. It is 63.8% among 13 to 15 year olds whose parents value monitoring, and 63.1% among those whose parents do not.
Direct messaging follows the phone more than the parent's preference. Across 2,653 in the study, smartphone owners use direct messages at 38 to 40%, whatever their parent's view of monitoring. Those without a smartphone use them at 9 to 10%.
How many platforms does a teenager use, and does using more mean posting more?
At 13 to 15, 45.7% use three or more platforms every day, up from 29.8% at 10 to 12.4 Using more means posting more only up to three: 11.5% of single-platform users create content, rising to 23.7% of those on three platforms and falling to 14.7% of those on four.
The fall is steeper among 13 to 15 year olds. Their content creation peaks at 28.0% of those on three platforms. It drops to 11.9% of those on four, below the 12.1% of those on a single platform.
At 10 to 12, one platform a day is the most common count. At 13 to 15, the most common counts run from one to three. The share using no platform daily falls from 14.8% at 10 to 12 to 8.3% at 13 to 15. Daily TikTok use and daily Snapchat use go together. Among 10 to 15 year olds, 63.9% of daily TikTok users also use Snapchat daily, against 22.0% of those who do not use TikTok every day.
Footnotes
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"The Big Five", a Dubit Trends study of 3,009 households in the US and UK, published February 2026. It covers how teens use YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and WhatsApp. Every figure on this page comes from it. The TikTok follow figures rest on 1,227 TikTok users, and the index figures on 1,145 young people who use both TikTok and YouTube. ↩
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Same study. The in-person and digital sharing figures cover the full sample of 3,009. The other bases are 580 daily users of both TikTok and YouTube, 707 daily YouTube users who do not use TikTok, 855 TikTok video watchers and 1,632 YouTube video watchers. ↩
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Same study, 13 to 15 year olds: 155 whose parents distrust TikTok and 231 whose parents trust it. The direct-message figures rest on 2,653 respondents. ↩
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Same study. Where a figure is for an age band, the sentence names it. ↩
