Not so long ago many 12 year-olds anticipated their thirteenth birthday not only for the celebration, but for their new ability to join the world’s largest social network, Facebook. It was a rite of passage. Now it seems, kids aren’t as interested in joining Facebook. Instead they prefer Instagram, Snapchat and most of all YouTube.
A Pew Research poll found that the share of teens who say they use Facebook has fallen to 51%, with only 10% saying they use the platform regularly. In contrast, 85% use YouTube, with 72% and 69% using Instagram and Snapchat respectively.
The report is more evidence of the quickly shifting tastes that take a social network from fashionable to passé as fast as you can say MySpace. Bloomberg’s Sarag Frier writes:
The U.S. is by far Facebook’s most lucrative advertising market, where it makes a staggering $23.59 in quarterly revenue per user. But that doesn’t mean growth can continue forever. The company said in its most recent earnings call that it’s effectively saturated the market in America and Canada, counting 185 million users in those two countries combined.
The new study demonstrates how difficult it may be to keep up that level of dominance, and how important the 2012 Instagram acquisition has been for Facebook’s future.
Instagram is slightly more popular than Snapchat overall, Pew said, with 72 percent of respondents saying they use the photo-sharing app compared with Snapchat’s 69 percent. But Snap Inc. is holding its own, despite Instagram’s frequent parroting of its features. About one-third of the survey’s respondents said they visit Snapchat and YouTube most often, while 15 percent said Instagram is their more frequent destination.
The fast changing pace of social media was hilariously captured by the Adobe Marketing Cloud advertisement from 2014 embedded below.
