The free data we all want

If you've ever seen our Global Digital Reports, you've hopefully found them to be a great source of insight into digital behaviours around the world. However, we still have some important gaps in our reporting, so we're hoping that you can help us to identify some credible new data sources to fill these gaps.

Just in case you've not seen these reports, they provide in-depth data and trends covering more than 240 countries and territories around the world. What's more, thanks to the generous support of We Are Social and Hootsuite, we make these reports available completely for free.

As a result, the reports now reach an annual audience of more than 8 million views across 220 countries. They've become an important source of insight for marketers and senior decision-makers everywhere, but they're also an essential resource for NGOs like UNICEF and The Red Cross, for organisations like The World Bank and The World Economic Forum, and for academics, students, and governments all over the world.

However, despite publishing more than 5,000 charts each year, we still receive regular requests for additional data. The good news is that we believe that it should be relatively easy to answer the most common of these requests – provided we can identify reliable sources of free information.

And that's where you come in.

There are three ways you can help:

1. If you can help us to 'fill' any of the data gaps listed below by providing us with free data, please leave a comment on this post with details, or send me a private message here on LinkedIn.
2. If you know someone else that might be able to provide us with free data, please tag the relevant individual(s) in a comment below. Please check this page before tagging anyone though, just in case we already use their company's data.
3. If you can't help with either of the above, you can still help us to reach more potential sources by sharing this post, and by leaving a comment below to tell us how you use these reports, so that people at prospective data providers can understand their value.

So, what are we looking for?

1. Share of web traffic by device: we're looking for a broader, global dataset to understand the share of web traffic that originates from mobile phones, computers, tablets, and other devices. Ideally, we're hoping to publish global averages on a quarterly basis, and data for each individual country in the world every January. Aggregated and anonymised data from a company like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics / Experience Cloud would be the ideal source, but we're having trouble identifying the right person / team to speak to at these companies, so please leave a comment below if you can help us with that, or if you have any other suggestions for potential sources.

2. YouTube user demographics: we'd like to report an overview of YouTube's users by age and gender, just like we already do for most other top social media platforms. We know that these data are available in some of Google's existing, free tools that they make available to advertisers (e.g. Reach Planner), but we're having trouble convincing Google to give us access to these tools and to let us publish the data, so if you or someone you know can help us remedy that, that would be wonderful – just leave a comment below with details.

3. WeChat user demographics: we'd like to be able to report an overview of WeChat's global user base by age and gender, as we already do for most of the other top social media platforms. Ideally, we'd want to report by gender, as well as by the following user groups: 13-17, 18-24 , 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, and 65 and above.

4. WeChat user data by country: we'd also like to be able to report WeChat's active user base by each individual country, as we already do for most other social media platforms.

5. Social media platform user numbers: we're looking for a regularly updated source of global monthly active users (MAUs) for the following platforms. This could be an individual at each company who can share the latest numbers every quarter. Note that – for the purposes of comparability – we need monthly active user data – not daily or weekly users, nor total registered members. Please also note that we already have generic contacts for each company (e.g. media / press email addresses); what we're hoping for is a person at each company who is authorised to share public updates for each of the following platforms:

• LinkedIn
• Viber
• Snapchat (note our focus on MAUs – not DAUs)
• Youku
• TikTok / Douyin
• Skype
• Baidu Tieba (Baidu Post Bar)

Lastly, if you're able to provide us with any other free data relating to people's use of digital devices and internet-powered services, please get in touch via private message (you might need to send me a connection invite first – here's a link to my profile)

And if you'd like to get an idea of what we already publish, our free report library is a great place to start.

Thanks very much for your help! We hope we'll be able to show our gratitude by publishing some great new, free data in our upcoming reports.