Another Study Finds Teen Facebook Use On The Decline

Yet another study has come out indicating that teen Facebook use has dropped significantly. Mashable points to data from GlobalWebIndex, saying that active teen users in the U.S. fell 11%. But Faceboo...
Another Study Finds Teen Facebook Use On The Decline
Written by Chris Crum
  • Yet another study has come out indicating that teen Facebook use has dropped significantly.

    Mashable points to data from GlobalWebIndex, saying that active teen users in the U.S. fell 11%. But Facebook still dominates the landscape.

    “The site continues to experience declines in levels of active usage but the extent of the drop in the second half of 2013 (down 3%) has been significantly over-exaggerated in some reports; it is still hugely popular among all demographic groups and there have in fact been increases in the audience sizes for its apps,” the firm says in a report.

    For comparison, YouTube usage is also down 3% according to this survey. Meanwhile, Facebook-owned Instagram is up a whopping 23%, the most of any network measured.

    Usage from the 16-24s demographic is only up on YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr, according to the report.

    Facebook losing teens has been a popular storyline throughout the past year or so, but the conversation really ramped up when Facebook CFO David Ebersman made comments on one of the company’s earnings calls.

    “Our best analysis of youth engagement in the U.S. reveals that usage of Facebook among U.S. teens overall was stable from Q2 to Q3, but we did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens,” he said.

    Later, COO Sheryl Sandberg downplayed the idea that Facebook has a problem with teen usage, saying that reaction to the comment was blown out of proportion. It didn’t help that Facebook was reportedly trying to acquire teen darling Snapchat for billions of dollars.

    Since then, other studies have come out indicating that Facebook does have a teen problem.

    Last month, a report from a professor of material culture at University College London, who is part of the EU’s Global Social Media Impact Study, found that Facebook is “dead and buried” among the 16-18-year-old demographic.

    As recently as last week, iStrategyLabs released a report indicated that Facebook lost over 11 million addressable high school and college-age members over the past three years.

    Image via Thinkstock/Josh Wolford

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