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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think you've got it. In high school, I saw my friends in person every single day.
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.
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 critical demographic slice is hardly a drop in the ocean."
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.
They won't. China, Japan and Russia all have their own deeply entrenched social networks; 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.
Qui Bono?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.