Topline
Pop singer Ariana Grande announced Wednesday she had married fiancé Dalton Gomez in a “tiny and intimate” wedding ceremony, driving a massive social media frenzy that—a testament to her wild popularity—outpaced the online buzz around some of America’s other most popular couples.
LOS ANGELES, CA - JANUARY 26: Ariana Grande attends the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards at Staples Center ... [+]
Key Facts
Grande, who broke the news on Instagram, boasted the most popular posts of the week on both Instagram and Facebook, according to CrowdTangle, earning an eye-popping 65 million likes on wedding-related images across both platforms in just four days.
The most-liked post, which accumulated 26 million hearts on Instagram and over 3 million reactions on Facebook, eclipsed the social media engagement around other major celebrity weddings of 2021, including actress Aubrey Plaza’s marriage to screenwriter Jeff Baena.
Furthermore, even the least popular of her wedding photos, with 17 million likes on Instagram, surpassed by at least 3 million the same metric on wedding photos from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (2019), Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner (2019), Hillary Duff and Matthew Koma (2019), Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra (2018) and Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin (2018).
Notably, many of the couples that would likely contend with Grande’s online fan base either didn’t share photos of their weddings directly on social media or did so when leading photo-sharing app Instagram had significantly lower user numbers (Instagram has increased from 400 million users in 2014 to over 1 billion).
For example, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, who have since announced their divorce, had the first and second most popular pictures on Instagram the week of their 2014 wedding, but still have just 2.3 million likes on the most popular picture and did not have any trending images on Facebook.
Surprising Fact
Outside of the U.S., the royal weddings of both Prince William to Kate Middleton and Prince Harry to Meghan Markle have both shored up significant online excitement. While CrowdTangle data does not go back far enough to reveal the extent of the engagement around the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s 2011 wedding, posts about the “royal wedding” earned over 32 million interactions in the week surrounding Harry and actress Markle’s 2018 ceremony. An average of 24 million in the U.K. and 22.8 million in the U.S. tuned in to watch Prince William’s marriage to Middleton, while 18 million in the U.K. and 30 million in the U.S. watched Prince Harry and Markle’s.
Key Background
Grande—who rose to fame as an actress on the Nickelodeon series Victorious—has become one of the most popular singers in the world. She has released six studio albums and is currently tied in third for having the most Top 10 hits of all time on Billboard’s weekly pop charts. Grande was ranked the highest paid female musician on Forbes’s 2020 list of the highest-earning celebrities, boasting an estimated net worth of $72 million.
Big Number
239 million. That’s how many followers Grande has on Instagram, making her the fourth most-followed account on the platform after Instagram (394 million), Christiano Ronaldo (292 million) and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (241 million).
