
3 Million Teens Leave Facebook In 3 Years: The 2014 Facebook Demographic Report - corbett3000
http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-facebook-in-3-years-the-2014-facebook-demographic-report/
======
freehunter
Leave, 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.

~~~
waylandsmithers
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.

~~~
adamdavis
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?

~~~
waylandsmithers
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...](http://news.yahoo.com/job-seekers-getting-asked-facebook-
passwords-071251682.html)

------
bicknergseng
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.

~~~
pessimizer
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.

------
jonheller
Having the third word in the infographic being misspelled ("Unkown") does not
instill much confidence in the data at large.

------
Bud
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.

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mathattack
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.

~~~
jacalata
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?

~~~
mathattack
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?

------
cliveowen
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.

~~~
dnautics
I think your overall argument might be correct, but 25% of a demographic slice
is hardly a drop in the ocean.

~~~
Ensorceled
Slight correction:

"I think your overall argument might be correct, but 25% of a _critical_
demographic slice is hardly a drop in the ocean."

~~~
brazzy
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.

~~~
Ensorceled
Teens and 18-24 are a critical demographic to ANY site that sells advertising.

~~~
brazzy
That's so last millenium thinking....
[http://www.fastcocreate.com/1679811/rise-of-the-olds-
adverti...](http://www.fastcocreate.com/1679811/rise-of-the-olds-advertising-
catches-up-with-a-new-demographic)

------
debt
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.

~~~
brazzy
> 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.

~~~
dexen
_> 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.

------
gress
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?

------
obblekk
But how many additional teens are there on Instagram now?

~~~
joelmbell
Would be interesting to know. Teens leave Facebook to go to instagram.. which
is owned by Facebook.

~~~
xcrunner529
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.

------
dba7dba
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.

~~~
Theodores
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.

------
Tsagadai
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).

------
hawkharris
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?

~~~
cmelbye
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.)

------
kaliblack
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.

------
apandhi
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.

~~~
garrettlarson
The number of "married" teens is inflated by people jokingly reporting
themselves as married to their friends.

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sn0v
That last table though - 5.6% of teens (13-17) were married?! Something's
clearly wrong with the data at hand.

~~~
criswell
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.

~~~
vellum
4.5% of 15-19 year olds are married. Teens lying about their age to get on
Facebook could also factor into 5.6%.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_marriage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teen_marriage)

~~~
qq66
The 5.6% is based on age 13-17 which for the purposes of marriage is very
different than 15-19.

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kbar13
That is a rather interesting header image.

