3 Million Teens Leave Facebook In 3 Years: The 2014 Facebook Demographic Report
istrategylabs.comLeave, or never sign up? The thing about people is that they age. Someone who fell into the 18-24 category could very well be in the 25-34 category three years later (that category showed growth). While certainly not all of the people aged themselves out of the categories with the most negative growth, I'm left to wonder how many of them did. Say 1 million 16 year olds are now 19 year olds. With no new signups, this would leave 1 million fewer 13-17 year olds and 1 million more 18-24 year olds. In that same time frame, 2 million 23 year olds are now 26 year olds. This leaves a negative on the 13-17 category as well as a negative on the 18-24, but a positive on the 25-34 category.
Obviously my numbers are completely made up and hardly reflect reality. But as it stands, this is pretty meaningless data to draw the conclusion that 3 million teens have left Facebook. The only conclusion is that 3 million Facebook users are no longer teenage Facebook users (either no longer teenagers or no longer Facebook users). If teens are aging themselves out of the "teen" category and the younger generation isn't signing up to fill their place, that's not the same as "leaving" Facebook.
I think your analysis is the right way to look at it. Given how hard it is to actually leave Facebook, what this statistic probably means is "3 million fewer 13-year-olds joined Facebook than the number of 17-year-old Facebook users last year.
It does show that Facebook's demographics are skewing older. But I believe it's because their population is aging, not that existing users are leaving.
Facebook only reports DAU and MAU stats for users so leaving is easy. It just means not logging in for a month.
How does twitter report usage? I bet 50% of their users don't log in month-after-month if they wanted to skew that data.
The narrative makes sense. When I was in college, the mindset was that you HAD to be on facebook. Now, I'm not so sure teenagers want to volunteer information and photos that their parents might see, since they're probably already on facebook, especially when there are a million other social apps that crush the facebook experience on mobile.
I think information on usage would be more useful here, since deleting your profile is kind of dramatic, and why burn all the connections you already have, raise red flag to employers etc. and I feel that most who want to abandon facebook simply don't check it or post anything.
ctrl+F "mobile" you are the only person to mention it.
I can't see any reason why anyone these days let alone very (also) mobile teens would want to be on a service such as Facebook that seems to me so static and verbose.
CBC Radio here in Canada had a professor on who studied people in their early 20s at the university and one incident they mentioned was a class where students had to call businesses to ask about a wanted ads. These students were so unaccustomed to speaking on a telephone they were terrified to the point where some quit the class rather than speak to someone on the phone.
I think young people, say under 30, use Twitter and Snapchat and whatever IM service etc. as their means of communication not as a social entertainment; it's their sole means of communicating. To them it's an essential service a way to communicate so some ad filled overly complicated website is useless to them.
This is a minor digression, but I just have to know - have things gotten so bad that not having a facebook profile actually raise a red flag to an employer or is what you're saying just conjecture?
I think it's kind of like house hunting. Sometimes you'll see listings where there is only one photo, and it's of the outside of the house. You can't help but wonder about what they have to hide, right? If it had a huge kitchen and nice bathrooms, wouldn't they want to put these on display?
It's obviously not fair to treat job candidates this way, but in a world where social media exists, I can understand it being difficult for this thought to not cross the mind of an employer.
http://news.yahoo.com/job-seekers-getting-asked-facebook-pas...
In my experience it's slowly becoming a 'weird' flag but linkedn is more often cited as weirder flag.
25-34 is definitely the most conspicuous group to me, simply because Facebook was brand-new, red-hot, & in vogue when the younger end of this demographic was in college (the original target market).
Also need to discuss demographic trends. I'm not sure of the exact stats and too many spammy content farms to find the numbers, but I believe there's fewer teens and more baby boomer "folks" category people.
Total speculation driven by personal anecdotal evidence:
I think a lot of teens don't have a use for Facebook yet. Facebook is a pretty good tool for staying connected with people from high school and college and past jobs that you wouldn't see otherwise. Most teens are in high school with the same people from their jr high/gradeschool. They have smaller social networks, are focused on small groups of immediate friends, and have watched the kids a year or two older than them get in serious trouble for posting the stupid stuff teens do on the permanent social networks (Twitter, Facebook), and would rather use ephemerality (Snapchat) to avoid accountability.
Sorry, accidental downvote.
> They have smaller social networks, are focused on small groups of immediate friends
I think you're right about this - teens actually see most of their friends a lot. The majority of my friends live in different cities than I do. Facebook is clearly more useful for me than them.
In high school I used Facebook to share photos with friends and comment on them. Similar to what people use Snapchat and Instagram for now.
Having the third word in the infographic being misspelled ("Unkown") does not instill much confidence in the data at large.
Did anyone else notice that the numbers for 2011 seem to have a resolution of about 120, whereas the numbers for 2014 (by age) are either rounded to the nearest million, or else they just don't have good enough info to guess to anything closer than the nearest million?
And the "3 million" claim is based on multiplying this guessed-at year-over-year variance by 3. So if the margin of error is about a million, times 3...uh, you do the math, folks.
Grandma and Grandpa seem to be more than compensating for lost teens.
A couple other #s surprised me:
- NY's 100+% growth. I would have thought NYC would be an early adopter. Why so different than Chicago? Chicago's 2011 # seems very close to NYC, so perhaps Chicago was an earlier adopter? Same with LA.
- The dropoff in College is interesting too, but not amongst alums. It's almost like Facebook is more useful to people who are more scattered from their old friends.
It's almost like Facebook is more useful to people who are more scattered from their old friends
I think you've got it. In high school, I saw my friends in person every single day.
being more useful to people who aren't near their friends could explain constant growth in NYC too - don't people consistently move to there after college?
Yes - but it looks like a lower base. The initial # is very closer to Chicago. Almost like NYers were too cool for it for a while, but not now?
When will we stop crying wolf for every tech company's demise when there's no enough data to support any kind of underlying trend?
3 million is a drop in the ocean for Facebook and I don't even know how much valuable the teen demographic might be. Teen for the most part don't have jobs (heck, these days even older men have trouble finding jobs) and have to beg parents to buy them things. If you advertise a certain product on Facebook they don't go to, say, Amazon and translate the intention into action, so conversion rates must be abysmally low.
Trust me, Facebook can take it.
> When will we stop crying wolf for every tech company's demise when there's no enough data to support any kind of underlying trend?
I don't think it's tech companies in general that we're looking for the demise of. Social networks have been observed to have a short shelf life. Friendster had a meteoric rise and fall. MySpace had a meteoric rise and fall. Facebook has had a meteoric rise, and many people are waiting for their inevitable meteoric fall, and wondering who'll be next. Facebook seems to be intent on learning from history, hence their expensive acquisisitions of potential competitors.
I think your overall argument might be correct, but 25% of a demographic slice is hardly a drop in the ocean.
Slight correction:
"I think your overall argument might be correct, but 25% of a critical demographic slice is hardly a drop in the ocean."
The question is whether teens actually are a critical demographic to Facebook.
Others here have already suggested that the main selling point of Facebook (keep in touch with friends and relatives whom you don't personally meet often) is not appealing to teenagers who see their friends daily and already have more contact with their parents than they'd ideally want.
Teens and 18-24 are a critical demographic to ANY site that sells advertising.
That's so last millenium thinking.... http://www.fastcocreate.com/1679811/rise-of-the-olds-adverti...
Sure, Facebook can take it, but that is a bellweather group.
This is so odd to me. I can't help but think that people who cite this study and studies that highlight the "decline" of Facebook are simply Facebook haters for one reason or another. They are just clamoring for a reason to hate on Facebook. Maybe they're just jealous of the Zuck.
It doesn't matter if teens aren't on Facebook. Why? Facebook, just like every other tech company right now, is taking operations global. If they lose 3 million teens in America they'll gain 3 million in Japan or Africa or China or Russia or India or etc.
Also, ultimately, nobody seems to be asking the question, why do we need teens to use Facebook? Are they perhaps converting later in life? Are teens not using Facebook and then becoming adults and still not using Facebook? Do we want to monetize minors? Are they even really worth monetizing?
I'm not saying the loss of teens of Facebook is a useless metric to follow, I'm rather asking people to answer more relevant question.
The more people talk about the decline of Facebook due to declining teen numbers, the more likely other people will think you have some sort of jealousy thing going for the Zuck. Honestly, these numbers tell you virtually nothing about "teen migration" away from Facebook. I feel like they're move to buy Snapchat was just to shut everybody about this teen bullshit.
Stop hatin' and get your facts straight.
For an ad revenue driven product, the dollar value of a teen in the US/Germany/UK/Japan is worth at least 100 times the value of a teen in India or Russia, and 1000 times a teen in Africa.
> If they lose 3 million teens in America they'll gain 3 million in Japan or Africa or China or Russia or India or etc.
They won't. China, Japan and Russia all have their own deeply entrenched social networks; Facebook is not going to gain much penetration there.
> Facebook is not going to gain much penetration there.
There is little to no customer loyalty on `social networking' sites. We used to have a deeply-entrenched website in Poland (`nasza-klasa.pl'), apparently everyone was on it... until the Facebook took over, seemingly overnight.
I need more teens in my basement.
Who paid for this report to be produced? iStrategyLabs is a marketing company, not unlike some of the other 'analysts' out there, and one of their paid functions is to shape opinion, not just report it.
Qui Bono?
But how many additional teens are there on Instagram now?
Would be interesting to know. Teens leave Facebook to go to instagram.. which is owned by Facebook.
This seems to be the case, which makes FB's acquisition very smart. Instagram seems to be, from my anecdotal evidence and the heavy promotion I see of it on Tumblr, growing very rapidly. FB has nothing to worry about when they have one of the trendy "simple" social networks in their camp. However, I would find it disappointing as Mark Z. that the FB platform itself would be dying with the younger generation.
I keep facebook only to keep in touch with friends (be able to send message or email once every year, in case they change it without letting me know).
I frankly don't like to read about what friends are doing because often, the friends are posting about happy moments/things/experiences. While I am very happy my friends are having good time/life, I ask myself, why am I NOT enjoying life as much as they are.
It's like as if people used to be envious of Hollywood stars in the past. People would read/watch about them and feel envy. Now that any facebook user can broadcast themselves, my friends are turning into mini-hollywood-stars.
I probably keep a MySpace account somewhere. Not that I have logged on. They might have deleted me for all I know.
At what point does your Facebook account become more like my MySpace account, and, do you still count as a Facebook user when you get to the stage I am at with MySpace?
That is the problem with these statistics. The people that are dropping out of using Facebook to be rare/occasional users still count on the chart as much as the people who are on Facebook all day.
Has the author considered that Facebook might not be releasing stats on teens for multiple reasons? It might not be a drop but unreleased information that is causing the numbers to change. That, and people frequently lie about their age on Facebook so you cannot trust someone's profile age to be their actual age or date of birth (nor should you be trying to work out how old someone is from their public profile but that is another matter).
What's curious about these statistics is that they seem to measure membership rather than engagement.
Do they account for people who register but neglect their accounts? People who choose to deactivate their accounts but don't know how to permanently delete them?
The numbers they report are number of active users, which they define as someone who has used Facebook in the past month. (Of course, I'm not sure if that applies to these particular numbers, which look like they may have been taken from Facebook's advertising tool which tells you an ad's potential reach.)
Does anyone know which demographic generates the most advertising revenue for Facebook (yes, I have tried to find this data myself)? I'm curious, but it would also provide context to the impact of the teen trends stories.
I think these numbers are a bit inaccurate.
There are 549,000 Married Teens (13-17), yet only 1000 Teen Parents.
That makes absolutely no sense to me. I would understand it if the numbers were reversed, but this is just plain inaccurate.
The number of "married" teens is inflated by people jokingly reporting themselves as married to their friends.
That last table though - 5.6% of teens (13-17) were married?! Something's clearly wrong with the data at hand.
A lot of people will say they're married to someone as a joke. I was in a relationship with "My Right Hand" for a while.
4.5% of 15-19 year olds are married. Teens lying about their age to get on Facebook could also factor into 5.6%.
The 5.6% is based on age 13-17 which for the purposes of marriage is very different than 15-19.
That is a rather interesting header image.