Overview
46% of internet users post original photos and videos online they have created themselves and 41% curate photos and videos they find elsewhere on the internet and post on image-sharing sites. Women are more likely than men to use Pinterest, while Instagram and Tumblr attract equal shares of men and women.
A nationally representative phone survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that:
- 46% of adult internet users post original photos or videos online that they themselves have created. We call them creators.
- 41% of adult internet users take photos or videos that they have found online and repost them on sites designed for sharing images with many people. We call them curators.
Overall, 56% of internet users do at least one of the creating or curating activities we studied and 32% of internet users do both creating and curating activities.
In addition, this is the first time that the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has asked questions about Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr.
About the Survey
A nationally representative phone survey of 1,005 adults (ages 18+) was taken August 2-5, 2012. It was conducted in English on landline and cell phones. The sample contained 799 internet users, who were asked questions about their online activities. The margin of error for the full sample is ± 3.7 percentage points. The margin of error for the internet sample is ±3.8 percentage points.
One special note on demographic analysis in this sample: This survey had 73 African-American internet user respondents and 72 English-speaking Hispanic internet user respondents. Those are not big enough sample sizes to do independent statistical analyses. As a result, there are no data in the demographic tables about race and ethnicity.