How fickle are kids these days? Just when all the grown ups started figuring out Facebook, college and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site.
Grandma and Grandpa showed up to have a conversation, but Billy and Sally were gone. Facebook cannot be excited about this.
The dramatic change in user demographics was picked up by iStrategyLabs today. Anyone can go through Facebook's self-serve advertising program and see the user demographics numbers the company estimates now, iStrategyLabs captured that data six months ago and saved it for comparison. The changes have been dramatic.
According to this data, from Facebook's own ad platform, there are actually fewer high school and college users on Facebook today than there were six months ago.
So then, where are the teenagers getting their over-sharing, co-dependent fix?
ReplyDeleteI cannot imagine that 20% of teenagers simply found out that they could do things without consulting first and then re-hashing later. What is their alternative?
(And yes, I understand the inherent peril of hypothesizing the motives/actions of teenagers, but still...this is a curious development because that mass of teenagers can't have changed behavior that quickly.)
What is the alternative? I have no idea! heheh Sadly, I am no longer a teenage and feel myself turning into that "old man that yells at kids on his lawn" more and more each day.
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