YouTube crushes Instagram and Facebook to emerge as India’s top sports platform across every age group: Comscore

The latest Comscore data shows that social platforms have become the primary access point for sports consumption in India. The strongest signal is seen in the shared audience platform split: YouTube is the dominant sports platform across every age group. In India, 95 percent of sports audiences aged 15 to 24 are on YouTube, the exact same number holds for the 25 to 34 cohort, and even among the 35-plus bracket 94 percent are present on YouTube. Instagram holds younger India, with 84 percent of 15 to 24-year-olds and 80 percent of 25 to 34-year-olds using it for sports, while Facebook becomes dominant after 35 years of age with 84 percent share. Snapchat collapses with age, moving from 43 percent in 15-24 year-olds to just 14 percent among those above 35. X (formerly Twitter) grows with age, rising from 30 percent in 15-24 to 36 percent in 35-plus.

Athlete impact on social has become a measurable growth engine by itself. Instagram engagement with Indian athlete profiles rose by 56 percent during H1 2025. Virat Kohli is the single biggest mover on social with an average of 2.6 million total actions per post, followed by Hardik Pandya at 1.9 million and Rohit Sharma at 1.6 million.

Sports and recreation brand handles now represent 20 percent of all engagement in the Indian social media landscape, which makes them one of the strongest content verticals by share of engagement. The top performing brands by engagement per post are Royal Challengers Bangalore at 540,000 actions per post, followed by IPL at 321,000 and Chennai Super Kings at 163,000 per post.

A major structural shift is clear: 55 percent of sports audiences in India are exclusive to social platforms, 42 percent are exclusive to non-social environments, and only 3 percent overlap between the two worlds. This confirms that social is not just an amplification layer, but a primary touchpoint in itself.

On a global level, digital sports has a total audience of 668 million unique visitors with a 37 percent reach. In India specifically, sports digital audiences total 118 million unique visitors. Importantly, this is a mobile economy: 90 percent of India’s sports digital audience is mobile-only while just 9 percent is desktop-only.

Within India, sports audiences have other major category overlaps. Seventy percent of them also consume gaming, 67 percent consume technology, 58 percent are travel-interested, while 31 percent are also involved in health content.

Taken together, the data points to a structural conclusion: in India, sports content is fundamentally social-first, mobile-first, and video-first. Brands and publishers cannot grow without social distribution, because that is where the majority of incremental sports audience sits and scales.