Facebook lost around 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year. 2018 won’t be much better.

Authored by recode.net and submitted by mvea
image for Facebook lost around 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year. 2018 won’t be much better.

Facebook is losing young users even quicker than expected, according to new estimates by eMarketer.

The digital measurement firm predicted last year that Facebook would see a 3.4 percent drop in 12- to 17-year-old users in the U.S. in 2017, the first time it had predicted a drop in usage for any age group on Facebook.

The reality: The number of U.S. Facebook users in the 12- to 17-year-old demographic declined by 9.9 percent in 2017, eMarketer found, or about 1.4 million total users. That’s almost three times the decline expected. There were roughly 12.1 million U.S. Facebook users in the 12- to 17-year-old demographic by the end of the year.

There are likely multiple reasons for the decline. Facebook has been losing its “cool” factor for years, and young people have more options than ever for staying in touch with friends and family. Facebook also serves as a digital record keeper — but many young people don’t seem to care about saving their life online, at least not publicly. That explains why Snapchat and Instagram, which offer features for sharing photos and videos that disappear, are growing in popularity among this demographic.

Overall, eMarketer found Facebook lost about 2.8 million U.S. users under 25 last year.

And Facebook’s 2018 doesn’t look much better.

The research firm released Facebook usage estimates for 2018 on Monday, and expects that Facebook will lose about 2.1 million users in the U.S. under the age of 25 this year.

EMarketer predicts that Facebook will see a decline in usage among all three age groups for people under 25:

A 9.3 percent drop for Facebook users under 11 years old. (Reminder: Facebook’s terms of service require that users must be 13 years old in order to create an account, though it’s easy to get around that.)

A 5.6 percent decline in users between 12 and 17 years old.

A 5.8 percent decline in users between 18 and 24 years old. This is the first time eMarketer has ever predicted a year-over-year decline in usage for this age group, though it has happened before. In 2016, Facebook’s user base for 18- to 24-year-olds fell by 1.5 percent.

Take the numbers with a grain of salt — eMarketer is an outside research firm so it doesn’t have the full picture that, say, Facebook has.

But the fact that eMarketer is predicting declines across the board is a bad sign for Facebook regardless. Young people offer a good barometer for what is popular, but more importantly for Facebook, losing out on the next generation of internet users in the U.S. is troubling for the company’s long-term dominance.

The good news for Facebook is that, despite the expected decline in younger users, eMarketer believes Facebook’s overall U.S. audience will continue to grow for the next few years. More importantly, perhaps, eMarketer expects Facebook-owned Instagram to grow significantly. The research firm believes Instagram’s U.S. user base will grow by 13 percent this year, to almost 105 million people.

That’s even better than Snapchat’s expected growth — eMarketer believes it will grow its U.S. audience by 9 percent in 2018. That would give Snapchat about 86.5 million users by the end of the year.

ken_new on February 12nd, 2018 at 16:21 UTC »

It’s so different from what it used to be. I started university in 2007 and Facebook was massive. It was the entire basis of social life. You’d get an invite for pre-drinks for the dorm down the hall.

Now, I never post anything because my mum and my auntie and my other auntie and my mums friend don’t understand the style of humour but will Like it within 15 minutes anyway.

xevizero on February 12nd, 2018 at 15:52 UTC »

Facebook has got two simple problems.

A) Young people find themselves surrounded by parents and family, while once Facebook used to be the place where you could hang out with friends, now you have to watch out for what you say..it's not anymore like being somewhere with your friends and the girl you like and you're trying to talk to, it's more like being in a constant ankward situation of your mom coming to get you after school and randomly making cringy jokes and making your friends laugh.

B) Ads. Most of my young friends started to get pissed off at facebook during the rise of mobile gaming and facebook microtransactions infested social games (i'd say around 2012). Notifications about Farmville and other crap had become unbearable, then the shift to the non chronological timeline happened and the content from your friends started to be replaced by ads and other cringy wannabe-viral campaigns. The content you still were able to see from friends was often outdated or dowright frustrating..I open facebook in november and still see as relevant a photo of all my old friends hanging out at the beach in July, just to make my grey November day feel more miserable; that post is useless: I can't interact with it because it would make me a creep who lurks through other people's personal profiles and old photos, I don't enjoy it and it's not relevant to that moment in time, i'd rather see what my friends were doing RIGHT NOW so that I could interact with them.

Basically Facebook has become old people's Reddit, and that's exactly why I personally don't use it. The few interesting posts that I find (from large pages or groups), see their comment section infested with opinions from the only people who still use Facebook, and whose trashy comments don't get penalized in any way (there is no burying trolls with dislikes like here on reddit), so this means tons of ignorants/old people, further making me wanna quit and come here where I can leave a long meaningful comment like this and still feel like someone in the world will either appreciate it, or at least read through it.

Basically I stopped using Facebook the moment when I found a gf and I had no further need to constantly try to socially interact with random people I barely knew; I would have kept skimming through the latest posts, but the less I started using it, the less interesting and more ads infested it got.

Ol' man Zuckerberg has a big problem to solve now. Slowly but surely user engagement with the platform is gonna fall in a positive feedback loop that's gonna leave Facebook with a 1 billion people userbase made up of barely active accounts, ads revenue is gonna fall even more and they'll have to shut the whole thing down or turn it into something else entirely (more akin to Linkedin or Instagram and other more focused networks that at least retain a purpose even when not that active)

wobwobbird on February 12nd, 2018 at 14:57 UTC »

You don't see anything about your friends on Facebook anymore, and that's what it's for. It's just funny videos and pictures, but you go into reddit to get those