
Facebook Is Losing Teens - kellyhclay
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/10/19/facebook-is-losing-teens-and-new-privacy-settings-wont-bring-them-back/
======
cookiecaper
As the article stated, it's difficult to overcome the "grandma factor" \--
once something becomes so pervasive as to be near-universal, even among
persons unlikely to be clued in, its cool factor is diminished if not
completely obliterated.

Some groups actively crave differentiation, and teenagers seeking to assert
their independence are prominent among them. It can be difficult to express
and explore in the way teenagers seek when you know all your grandparents,
great grandparents, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, cousins, second
cousins, etc. will be reading, as they surely will when you post on Facebook.

~~~
argonaut
As a 19 year old, I will say that from my perspective, this "coolness" factor
is seriously overblown and misunderstood. Facebook was _never_ "cool," even
when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old.
Facebook was always a highly addictive and vital _necessity_ \- a social
utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited
to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction.
It was never cool and I never saw how coolness or differentiation had anything
to do with it.

Likewise, Snapchat is not "cool." Snapchat is pretty maisntream now (among my
peers). It's popular because it's fun. All my peers use Snapchat as picture
messaging for frivolous photos you wouldn't put on Facebook/Instagram.

~~~
snogglethorpe
> _Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th
> grade, when I was around 14 years old_

At the time Facebook was cool, it wasn't open to 14 year olds...

~~~
ghaff
A bit blunt but, yeah. Facebook was arguably a lot more cool when you at least
needed an .edu address to get on. (Or a bit before or after that point
depending on your perspective.)

~~~
gaius
And a very specific .edu or .ac.uk at that. It's easy to be cool when you are
leveraging exclusivity already.

------
wavesounds
Facebooks is priced at 240X Price to Earnings. If they start losing users or
even stop growing its hard to imagine how that PE ratio continues to makes any
sense. Even with an increase in mobile revenue its still less then desktop
revenue and users are certainly flocking to mobile too which is a double
wammy. So facebook has to transition to making more money per user if its user
base stops growing. Otherwise you're going to have people really questioning
the price of the stock which could end up effecting the whole industry.

~~~
gohrt
I don't know Facebook's details, but in theory another possibility to lower
P/E: "Stop pouring money into expansion, to lower expenses and increase
bottom-line earnings."

For example, Amazon could certainly do that, since they spend heavily on
expansion

~~~
fauigerzigerk
That is an important aspect, but let's consider the P/S (price/sales) ratio to
gauge that savings potential:

Facebook: 22.3

Google: 5.9

Amazon: 2.3

(source: money.msn.com)

Of course, comparing to Amazon doesn't make sense. Retailers are always going
to have very low margins and low P/S ratios. But comparing to Google does make
sense. Assuming Facebook's potential margins are similar to Google's, Facebook
would have to have incredible sales growth or incredible cost cutting in order
to lower their P/E significantly.

I think it may be possible for Facebook to achieve that goal. People will put
up with incredible levels of spam and harrassment in exchange for not losing
"friends". So they might be able sell four times as many ads as they do now
and cut costs dramatically on top of it.

~~~
lmm
What was Google's P/S like 5 years ago?

~~~
fauigerzigerk
My very very rough guesstimate is that in 2008 Google's P/S was about 7.

Revenue: 22bn

Number of shares: 317mm

Average share price (P): $500

Revenues per share (RPS): $69.4

P/RPS = 7.2

------
VLM
At the peak of the CB "bubble" around 1978, roughly 10% of all cars had a CB
radio installed in them as a lower bound, although claims were it was higher,
like 15% to 20%.

That percentage has dropped somewhat since then...

There is no particular reason to assume the peaking and decline of a
socializing technology must result in its similar competitors growth in a
nearly identical field. It could be home video conferencing or terminals built
into vehicle seatbacks or far more likely, something we can't imagine at this
time.

And no, for you youngsters, the smartphone was not the social technology
replacement for CB, for basically all of the 80s and a substantial part of the
90s average people simply completely stopped technologically socializing in
their cars. I see no reason to prevent future people from simply not
socializing via handheld devices.

That doesn't mean the death of the industry, truck drivers still have CBs, but
your grandpa probably does not (not since Carter was president, anyway)

The industry can only make money on the up slope, but investors and innovators
can make money on both up and down slopes. Might be time to start thinking of
money making schemes for the down slope.

~~~
rietta
I never played with CB other than low power walkie talkies from radio shack. I
did get into amateur radio in 2003 and do have a radio that can be mounted in
the car. There seems to be quite a lot of activity on the air where I live.
It's still a fun hobby in 2013 and is a nice break from the daily grind of the
internet startup scene. It's funny how different various subcultures are -
even among technical people.

~~~
VLM
Even just within ham radio the subcultures are pretty wide, there's the HF
guys, the digital mode guys, the contesters, the microwave
builder/experimenters, the public service volunteer guys, the dxpedition ops,
the antenna system designers, the satellite/moonbounce ops... The good news is
it only takes several decades experience (and $$$$$$) to try everything by
which time someone's gone and invented something new.

------
yeukhon
Teens are attracted to Twitter, Instagram and Vine. They like these mini
social network where they could gain followers by posing interesting tweets or
photos or videos.

Youtube's top celerity usually started their channels when they were teen
(high school, freshman). Certainly getting your channel popular now is harder,
so the best way to get attention is either by posting photos or posting a
6-second videos.

Vine and Instavideos took the spike. Kids are spending more time watching
videos and looking at photos than reading statuses.

Ironically, IMO, Vine and instavideos took off partly because people could
publish to FB and Twitter. I spend most of my FB time either reading memes or
vine videos. i don't pay much attention to status anymore.

~~~
laichzeit0
I noticed this as well. Personally I feel that twitter/instagram/vine is more
informal and disposable. Facebook and its albums, status, friend lists, etc.,
it's all so formal to the point of being old-fashioned.

It feels like the current zeitgeist is not to give a crap about anything older
than a few hours. Instagram feels like it's only about about making "now" look
cool, hash-tagging it and then forgetting about it. Vine gives you a few
seconds of entertainment, about the threshold at when boredom kicks in.

Honestly about 99.999% of the time I never re-read a tweet, look at the same
instagram or vine. It's disposable social media. Facebook feels like the exact
opposite.

~~~
FkZ
I think that's probably a large reason along with two others:

They're more content focused. Twitter is about what people write, Instagram is
about the pictures people take. Facebook is about... the network? Facebook is
more muddled, and clarity is valued today.

Asymmetry. Yes, I know you can "like" things and get updates and you can join
groups, but ultimately the relationship between two users on Facebook has to
be agreed to by both.

------
6d0debc071
> However, teenagers have made it clear with their quick adoption of social
> networks such as Instagram and Snapchat they want to share everything and
> with as many people as possible.

Alternative explanation - teens want to share ephemerally and with a certain
degree of anonymity. They don't want their parents looking over their shoulder
at their friends or conversations, and seek to avoid entanglement with
sections of their social network that are going to bully them or have a
significantly lasting effect tied to a persistent searchable identity.

~~~
FkZ
The lack of anonymity and pseudonymity on Facebook is definitely a factor.
Facebook works under the assumption that we have one unified "identity" to
which we can and want to tie everything we do. In reality, we share different
parts of ourselves with different people at different times.

------
hawkharris
As more teenagers gravitate toward online social networks (if not Facebook,
then Instagram, etc.), I'm concerned that not enough of them will feel lonely.

I recently watched a Louis C.K. interview about young people and technology,
which struck a chord with me. I agree that adolescents benefit from a sense of
boredom and isolation because it encourages them to cultivate stronger in-
person social networks:

[http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-
phone](http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-springsteen-cell-phone)

~~~
vdaniuk
I am flabbergasted. Adolescents benefit from isolation? And you're citing a
comedian? Care to cite some serious sources?

~~~
dwaltrip
What the parent comment is trying to get at is that many people today do not
know how to sit quietly alone with their thoughts. If they have a single spare
moment, in less than half a second they whip out their phones and mindlessly
check fb, etc. Due to this, they are less pensive and self reflective. While
hard to test, it seems like a reasonable theory.

~~~
vdaniuk
Really? I am not sure. We've got a lot of quirks in our cognition and
intuition is not really a good heuristic for studying human mind.

~~~
zxcdw
Haven't _you_ noticed it yourself, that especially younger people seem to be
engaged with their mobile devices whenever there is a few minute idle time,
when e.g. waiting for a class to start. Quiet hallway, 10-20 people, all but a
few with their noses in their phones.

~~~
vdaniuk
Of course, I've noticed. But is it a bad thing? Reality is pretty dull for 90%
of humans.

~~~
pirateking
It is bad in the sense that it is an alternative, and growingly a replacement,
to using our biological escape from Reality - the Imagination.

Actively engaging the Imagination has a much greater potential to cross over
into Reality and affect it in such a way that escape is no longer necessary.
Escaping from Reality by relying on external input feeds and output sinks only
passively engages the Imagination and does not produce the same internal
Imagination-Reality-Manifestation loop.

As with most things, a healthy balance of both internal and external escapism
is probably the best. Calvin and Hobbes explains this the best.

~~~
vdaniuk
Right. First someone says that isolation is good for adolescencents citing a
comedian, you are arguing that mix of external and internal escapism is
probably the best as the comic explains. I am not a subject matter expert, but
comics are not an authority on psychology for me.

~~~
VLM
Authoritarianism is not much of an argument. None the less, I'll see your
making fun of comedians (and who is better to comment on the human condition
than a comedian?) and raise the stakes to Zen Buddhism. "And Buddha said, the
eightfold path to enlightenment begins with posting to your facebook wall and
ends with spend lots of time making your linkedin profile look pretty" Oh no
wait maybe I misquoted.

I have observed as I get older that teens suffer from many self caused
maladies, although an excess of calm introspection has never made that top 10
list. Given observation that teens are legendary for causing enormous amounts
of suffering because of a lack of even a tiny amount of thinking, that would
imply the scales are likely tipped far in excess away from a healthy level of
introspection. Its unlikely given an extreme situation that a return to
something approaching normal would be seriously controversial.

~~~
vdaniuk
I hugely respect Buddhist philosphy but quoting eight fold path in a
discussion about addiction to our gadgets is a non sequitur. Do you know who
is better to comment on the human condition? Actual scientists who study human
mind. And while psychology doesn't conform to some principles of scientific
rigor it produces useful models for improving human condition. They often
fail, but it is much better than intuition, comedian's intuition included.

------
treelovinhippie
Didn't Zuck say recently that the actual numbers weren't concerning, and that
they're aware they are past the "cool" stage and instead want to move on to
become the social fabric of the Internet, much like a utility.

~~~
psbp
This would make sense if they actually offered much utility. Even Google+ has
them beat when it comes to compelling features.

~~~
Myrmornis
Err, what? If I closed my facebook account I would lose virtually all contact
I have with every friend I have made other than the person I live with and a
few people who live near me and my family. How the hell is that not utility?

~~~
CoryG89
It's not really Facebook offering utility though. They offer the same features
every other site trying to be the "fabric of the internet" offers and some
would say not as much. It just so happens that everyone you know has a
Facebook at the moment.

~~~
Myrmornis
If I like watching birds and someone in my village puts up a bird feeder and
all the birds go there and he offers to let me come and watch in return for a
small payment then I would say that, while the birds are at his feeder, he is
offering utility. This remains true even if all the other villagers also put
up identical feeders which remain sadly birdless.

Whereas If I'm understanding you correctly, you would say that he is offering
utility only if the birds are at his feeder because of some unique bird-
attracting design features of his feeder which the other feeders lack.

That seems to me to be confusing an implementation detail with what actually
matters to the user: he just wants access to birds (his friends). He doesn't
care why they are where they are.

------
shadesandcolour
I don't even think that the reason is "Facebook isn't cool anymore". Facebook
is just annoying at this point. When Facebook was for your friends from
college and/or high school, things were great. You could post embarrassing
things that people did, inside jokes, whatever. Now your mom is on Facebook.
your grandma is on Facebook, and so is your boss. Yes you can stop them from
seeing everything you post or everything your friends post, but no one knows
that. There's probably a 50/50 chance that if I were to post something funny
and slightly embarrassing on a friends wall, BAM, there's their grandma who is
a tad bit confused. Then of course your friends grow up and all they post is
baby pictures.

Teenagers, who are looking to keep things private between them and their
friends, can't have their mom popping up on their Facebook pages all the time.

------
smoyer
MySpace is laughing ... not maliciously but because they now understand that
teens are a migratory species. You can't expect them to stay anywhere.

------
libovness
There are really two hypotheses:

1) _Teenagers in general_ do not use Facebook (which does _not_ rule out that
they will become avid Facebook users once they grow out of their teenage
years)

2) _Today's teenagers_ disinterest in Facebook is fundamentally different than
it was for teenagers' of several years ago (which would suggest they'll never
get attached to Facebook the way previous teenagers once did, and therefore
never become avid Facebook users).

The 10-K report suggests #2 ("younger users were less engaged with the social
network than previously") but my hunch is that it's more like #1 (I argued
this here: [http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity-
isnt](http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity-isnt)).

Teenagers now have more social networking options (Instagram, Snapchat, etc.)
to choose from than previous generations of teenagers - which explains why
today's teenagers are less engaged with Facebook than previously - but that
doesn't mean they won't want/need the kind of canonical identity that Facebook
provides (once that awkward, impressionable teenager actually grows into an
adult with a firmer identify).

------
tonydiv
For those referring to the social utility of Facebook, I recommend hiding your
news feed. The newsfeed is not a social utility, whereas messages, profiles,
looking up mutual friends, etc. IS a social utility. Here's how to hide your
newsfeed without affecting your experience on the rest of the site:

[https://medium.com/productivity-
efficiency/631ed8f466e1](https://medium.com/productivity-
efficiency/631ed8f466e1)

Basically, this trick uses a Chrome extension that hides the newsfeed using
custom CSS.

------
joelrunyon
> Karp wrote that all of her friends are using Instagram and Snapchat,

Well...Instagram is owned by facebook so there's that...

~~~
cookiecaper
As of only fairly recently, and it can still be a problem for the Facebook
brand even if the same conglomerate owns both units.

~~~
joelrunyon
Not if you think of facebook like a company & facebook.com & instagram.com as
services of the company with many more like it on the way.

------
ktd
I suppose the coming months/years will be when we see whether Facebook becomes
the "backbone of the social Internet" or just another MySpace. I honestly
don't know where the smart money is here-- it's an exciting time!

------
tantalor
This inevitability is an assumption of Facebook's strategy (see Zuckerberg's
Letter), and the reason they bought Instagram.

My suspicion is that teenagers will engage Facebook as they become adults and
the social pressures shift.

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Geee
Aren't Instagram and Snapchat completely different products? Of course, these
compete on the 'share of time' of the users, in which case everything teens do
is competing with Facebook.

~~~
tantalor
No, Facebook, Instagram, and Shapchat all do the same thing: photo & videos
sharing.

So do Twitter, Tumblr, reddit, MySpace, Google+, blogs, etc.

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ta_24278
They've been losing teens for a while now, and once you start losing teens, a
so-called "social networking" website is dead, it doesn't know it yet because
the agony may take a while.

Due to its unusual size for facebook it might take a longer while, but it's on
the path to irrelevance that many others have walked before: friendster,
myspace, msn, etc.

it's funy that the 10-13 years demographics adoption will make or kill an
online website.

------
ISL
If only Facebook had a product like Instagram, perhaps they could use it as a
gateway drug...

------
moinnadeem
As a teenager, Twitter is what everyone is using currently. Don't complicate
it, teens just want to be on what their friends are on, and their parents are
not on.

Twitter just fits the need.

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xdd
Facebook was cool until weaponized.

