Wrapping up
That’s (almost) all for this year’s flagship analysis – thanks for sticking with me all the way through this bumper writeup!
If you’re still looking for more data (!), I’d recommend starting with our Digital 2025 Country Headlines Report, which has essential figures for mobile, internet, and social media adoption in almost every country on Earth.
And if you’re looking for even richer insights into local-level trends and behaviours, you might like to know that our more detailed Digital 2025 local country reports will be available in DataReportal’s free online library starting in late February 2025.
But just before you go…
A tail as old as time
To conclude this year’s deep-dive, let’s explore what might be our most impawtant Global Digital dataset: who’s “winning the web” in 2025.
And you may want to hold on to your hat at this point, because the fur has really been flying this year…
After being top dogs on the internet for the past few years, it’s been something of a rough year for canines, and Google’s crawlers report that there are now more than a billion more web pages about cats than there are pages about dogs.
At first we thought they were just kitten, but – while perhaps not purrfect – it seems the stats are indeed fur real: Google search currently returns 6.48 billion results for “cat”, compared with just 5.44 billion results for “dog”.
Cats have been hounding pups over on Wikipedia too, with the authoritative site’s English-language page about felines attracting 5.18 million worldwide views in 2024, compared with just 2.86 million for the canine equivalent.
But while those numbers will certainly be mewsic to feline ears, 2024 wasn’t a total cat-astrophe for their sworn enemies.
Social animals
Indeed, it seems that humans are still far more interested in dogs, as evidenced by search index data from Google Trends.
The world’s favourite search engine reports that global interest in dogs averaged 89 out of a pawsible 100 for 2024 as a whole, whereas interest in cats only averaged 55.
As a result, there’s a purrsuasive argument to be made that the current supremacy of cat pages on the web may all be down to copycat content churned out by GenAI.
And while some might dismiss such claims as tall tails, they may actually be borne out by the latest social media data.
For example, the world’s Instagram users have published 390 million posts tagged with #dog, compared with just 303 million posts tagged with #cat.
Canines also come out ahead of kitties on TikTok, with the platform’s users viewing posts tagged with #dog 787 billion times to date, compared with 754 billion views for posts tagged with #cat.
The gap is far clearer over at X though, where cats seem to have fallen totally out of favour.
Perhaps they largely deserted Twitter after the demise of Larry the Bird?
Either way, the platform’s advertising tools suggest that X users are now five times more likely to be interested in dogs than they are to be interested in cats.
Meowch.
