• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, December 9, 2013

In a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center Internet Project, more than half of Internet users post or share photos or videos online, which has become an integral part of the online social experience.

The latest data shows that:

• 54% of adult Internet users post original photos or videos online that they themselves have created. These are called creators in the study, and their number has grown from 46% of internet users last year
• 47% 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. The study calls them curators, and their number has grown from 41% of Internet users last year.

The creator group is made up of those who have posted photos they have taken themselves (52% of internet users do so) and those who have posted videos they have taken themselves (26% of internet users).  If a person did either of these activities (or both), they are considered an online image creator.

The curator group is made up of those who have taken photos they found online and posted them on a site used for sharing images with others (42% of internet users have done so) and those who have taken videos they found online and posted them to a video-sharing site (36% of internet users have done so). If a person did either of these activities (or both), they are an online image curator.

Taken together, 62% of Internet users have done at least one of these creating or curating activities. This is a significant increase from the 56% who did so in 2012. 40% of Internet users are both creators and curators.

The near-ubiquity of cell phone ownership and the rapid rise of smartphones has created a platform for mobile photo, and video, sharing. The survey found that 92% of Americans own a cell phone, and 58% own a smartphone. Mobile apps like Instagram and Snapchat have capitalized on user bases equipped and eager to capture and share visual moments. This is the first read on Snapchat by Pew, and the first time they have asked cell phone owners about Instagram:

• 9% of cell phone owners use Snapchat, the photo and video sharing app that automatically deletes images after they have been viewed
• 18% of cell phone owners use Instagram, a photo and video sharing social media app with signature filters

A nationally representative survey of 1,000 adults ages 18+ was taken October 3-6, 2013, conducted in English on landline and cell phones. The margin of error for the full sample is +/- 3.7 percentage points.

For more information from Pew Research, please visit here.