The world's largest social network, Facebook, is facing a serious internal existential crisis: an aging user base. Earlier this year, a Facebook researcher shared some alarming statistics.
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Since 2019, Facebook’s teen app users in the U.S. have declined by 13 percent. A study reported that a 45 percent decline is expected between 2019 and 2021, leading to an overall decline in daily users in the company’s most lucrative ad market. Young adults in their 20s and 30s are expected to decline by 4 percent (over the same period). Worse, the younger a user was, the less engaged they were with the app. The message is clear: Facebook is losing younger users, and fast.
“The aging issue is real,” the researcher wrote in an internal memo. They predicted that if “fewer and fewer teens choose Facebook as they get older,” the company would face a more “severe” decline in young users than it had previously predicted.
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The findings, echoed by other internal documents and my conversations with current and former employees, show that Facebook sees its aging user base as an existential threat to the long-term health of the business and is desperately trying to fix the problem with little sign that its strategy will work. If it doesn’t make the right moves, Facebook could, in fact, lose an entire generation. And while Instagram remains incredibly popular with teens, Facebook’s own data shows that they are starting to engage less with the app.
The internal documents are part of disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress by legal counsel for Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee.
Facebook's struggle to attract users under 30 has been going on for years — since 2012, to be exact. But the problem has only gotten worse recently, according to the documents. While it started as a networking site for college students, employees have predicted that the aging of the app's audience — nearly 2 billion daily users — has the potential to turn everything upside down.
The above problem is the explanation for why the company has expressed interest in creating apps suitable for children. In 2017, it debuted a standalone Messenger app for kids, and its plans for a version of Instagram for kids fell through after lawmakers disapproved of the company's initiative.
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At the same time, the fact that new social media apps are launched so frequently has troubled the company, which is constantly monitoring competitors. In an internal presentation earlier this year, employees estimated that teenagers spend 2-3 times more time on TikTok than on Instagram, and that Snapchat is the preferred method of communicating with their best friends.
Source of information: theverge.com
