Facebook's Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users
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.
As you can see in the chart above, young people by age are up a small amount, but young people by school level are down. Users with undeclared education levels are way up, implying that many high school and college students may simply no longer be listing their schools at all on the site. That's a dramatic change too for a site that began as a network for college students. We wouldn't be surprised if Facebook stopped showing advertisers the number of high school and college students soon and relied only on the age distribution.
Who is the company that is presenting these historical numbers? A quick check around the web shows that iStrategyLabs is one of the top sponsors of the Apps for Democracy contest with the D.C. government and company CEO, Peter Corbett, as a judge for the Apps for America project with the Sunlight Foundation - those are some pretty good credentials when it comes to saving a set of numbers accurately for six months. The company's spreadsheet of Facebook data it's captured since October, 2007 is here.
Facebook's communication team told us in response to this comparison that those numbers are "rough, not actual" - but they are going to check on the historical numbers internally and get back to us. Given that the number of male users plus the number of female users adds up to a lower number than the number of users shown when no gender is selected in the advertising platform - we suspect that the numbers Facebook is showing its advertisers are very rough. Users cannot create an account without specifying one gender or another.
We can't help but wonder whether the kinds of privacy measures that Facebook is sticking its toe in the water with right now could have helped six months ago: letting messages be made visible only to limited groups of people instead of all messages going to all your Facebook connections no matter the context. Instead, Facebook seems determined to push everyone into making their content on the site more public, not less. That may not matter if the kids aren't around to be upset. Then the advertisers will be left pitching their products to senior citizen late adopters - and 35 to 54 year old users, now the biggest group on the site.
It's not a pretty picture, but we await further response from Facebook.
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One has to wonder if that's b/c 55+ users are just joining the social media scene and FB is the new "place to be," whereas younger people have been involved for a while. Consequently, they are already on FB (in tens of millions) on MySpace, or elsewhere. In other words (and to use an expression those 55 plusers will understand), is this just a tempest in a teapot?
The data-gathering techniques used here are suspect, but let's say they're mostly right. Where are the 'kids' going? I doubt there's a large migration back to myspace. We need a meta tracking system that can visualize migration patterns between social networks.
Thanks for featuring our research, Marshall.
If you'd like any further substantiation regarding the historical data, you can see in the following post that I originally blogged about the January 2009 figures here (and had compared them to six months prior as well):
http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009-facebook-demographics-and-statistics-report-276-growth-in-35-54-year-old-users/
Lastly, just a quick point of fact...while I personally was a judge of Apps for America - iStrategyLabs (my company) is the creator of Apps for Democracy http://www.appsfordemocracy.org a campaign we do for the DC government.
Take care,
-Peter
http://www.twitter.com/corbett3000
Student will get older, right?
@Mike what's suspect about the data gathering method? I'm pulling info directly out of Facebook Social Ads targeting system...this is raw data provide by the source itself.
Regarding where the kids are going....my guess is they're using SMS, twitter, and something us old folks haven't heard about yet.
Interesting since it started in college. Maybe it's not that "cool" when the g'parents are using it.
Posted by: Vadim Lavrusik
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July 6, 2009 7:10 PM
Facebook is undergoing an identity crisis. They've been actively depreciating - for the worse - the idea of a profile (a user's "face"), and attempting to clone the twitter / friendfeed model.
It should be said that they're doing an OK job of cloning Friendfeed, but this is a betrayal against the desires of the its original audience, and likewise, it's no surprise they're less interested.
Facebook needs to quickly bring back and re-emphasize the features and usefulness of the old Home Feed (eg. detailed customization settings and friend discovery). The new "live stream" is neither live nor interesting (its cluttered with crappy applications), and in every way except for privacy controls, it's inferior to friendfeed.
Youth is wasted on the young
No, fjpoblam, I think these days Youth is wasted on Farm Town. :)
I agree with Alex, there seems to be a growing number of the 55+ age group discovering Facebook and I think this demographic is growing every day. Whilst Facebook seems just as popular with the younger age group. My son, my niece, and the teenage kids of my friends, are all glued to Facebook.
In fact my son was mortified when his 70 year old grandparents joined Facebook last month and wanted to add him as a friend. I don't think his street cred would cope with having his grandparents on his Friends list lol
Finally the kids are rebelling. Stay of facebook if you know what's good for you. Unless of course you plan to be on you best behavior for the rest of your life.
If anyone needs the excel file I used to create that graphic shown in the post (along with data going back to 10/22/07) you can find that here:
http://bit.ly/fbookdata
-Peter
http://www.twitter.com/corbett3000
I don't see why facebook would not be happy with an increase in over 55's. You just might learn something from us oldies. We have a lot of experience to offer
Let's not overthink FB. Kids just move on. I'm more curious where they are moving to.
Dave, that's well said. In every way but business it's not good for them, though. Everyone wants sexy 18 to 25 year olds with expendable income, insecurity and no appreciation for what's really meaningful in life. That's where the money is.
That's exactly what I was going to say Marshall. Us 18-25 year old demographic are what all the companies are trying to get at.
And speaking as that demographic I have to say that what this article says doesn't really fit into what I've seen. While I agree with what Tollie said earlier and while many kids weren't happy with ANY of the changes facebook made it seems like none of my friends were mad enough to stop using it.
P.S. my mom added me to facebook and yes it is quite embarrassing :-P
I thought they should have left it for students and college alumni only. It's original draw was it's closed community and, yes, elitism.
I understood when kids jumped ship from Myspace to Facebook, but where are these kids going? Twitter?
I think you need to consider the possibility that the observed “loss” of users that are in “High School” or “College” in July is motivated by graduation, not “flight”. This would be relatively straightforward to confirm, and hardly surprising; graphing the data as a time series might show sharp downward stairsteps in May and June as students graduate, and upticks in August and September as kids matriculate.
If that turns out to be the case, the data shows engagement rather than flight, and suggests that kids in those demographics not only use Facebook, but care enough about it to keep their demographic information current. Which all translates to more value for advertisers, rather than a cause for alarm.
Another demographic switch. If not Facebook or MySpace, where are younger users moving now? What's next, say the fickle?
Posted by: Rob McNair-Huff
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July 6, 2009 9:30 PM
How does this news sync with the news in May that boomers were quitting FB in droves?
http://tinyurl.com/r5llax
While sitting at an AVP event a few months ago. I over heard a few "young" people discuss how appauled they were when their aunts and bosses were sending them friend requests on FB. Since most of them are posting drunk party pics, they idea of aunt karen seeing that and telling mom and dad is not appealing.
As older people migrate to Social sites the youth will migrate elsewhere!
@partyaficionado
I've seen nothing but youth surging to Facebook. Those who get it stay with it, and those who don't are like the Twitter users who come, join, and never update. Just from my knowledge of y'know...being a youth.
Posted by: Sean Quinn
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July 6, 2009 10:19 PM
"It's not a pretty picture, but we await further response from Facebook."
What's not a pretty picture? The end user for this product started skewing older and that's a terrible thing? Oh please, if you run a business you have to know who your clients are. Just because Facebook started out for a younger audience doesn't mean it should stay that way forever. One thing I've learned in business is adapt or die. They should accept this shift in client demographics and just roll with it.
Two comments:
* The "decline" of youth is in the percentage of total FB users, not in absolute numbers. Yes, partly it might be more hip to be where your parents/grandparents are not. But, to a very large extent I believe the explanation is saturation. The FB penetration in the younger age segment is most likely very high (see Swedish numbers here: http://thekillerattitude.com/2009/03/two-million-facebook-users-in-sweden.html) - a large portion of the youth already have FB, so the growth opportunity is not that big for that segment.
* Also, you note that "Given that the number of male users plus the number of female users adds up to a lower number than the number of users shown when no gender is selected in the advertising platform - we suspect that the numbers Facebook is showing its advertisers are very rough. Users cannot create an account without specifying one gender or another."
- Well, a while ago you where able to create FB accounts without specifying gender. And I don't think FB forces you to specify gender "afterwards", so the non-gender-specified-users are most probably users that signed up a while ago, with no gender specified.
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics!
You were on the right track with "implying that many high school and college students may simply no longer be listing their schools at all on the site."
The only conclusion that you might be able to draw from these numbers is that new users are less likely to share details.
You have to make a lot of assumptions to conclude that "Facebook's Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers [and there are] Now More Grandparents Than High School Users".
But good headline. I fell for it.
I think facebook should be excited by having older users.
These guys have much more money and can be targeted better for businesses that offer core products for that age group. A company like saga holidays would do good business I expect.
"Users with undeclared education levels are way up, implying that many high school and college students may simply no longer be listing their schools at all on the site."
That line says it all... Facebook have been de-emphasizing networks for a while now, and are due to remove them altogether soon. The undeclared education levels more than make up for these losses, and it's because students joining the site now are NOT encouraged to join their college network (the complete opposite of the early days when you HAD to join a college network using your college email address to even register for the site).
"Given that the number of male users plus the number of female users adds up to a lower number than the number of users shown when no gender is selected in the advertising platform - we suspect that the numbers Facebook is showing its advertisers are very rough. Users cannot create an account without specifying one gender or another."
That's actually not the case. Until about a year ago (maybe less), it was not required to specify your gender when registering. Facebook then began showing one of their message prompts on the home page asking users who has not done this to set their gender. I would imagine there were still a lot of people who just ignored this message which would account for the shortfall.
Steve looks right. It's not that HS and college users are leaving the site -- far from it, since 0-17 grew by nearly a quarter, and 18-24 (the demo with the least expected growth) grew by five percent. Instead, these users are just less likely to declare their HS or college, which makes sense given the decreased emphasis on doing so.
Also, a quick (perhaps too quick) look at US census age numbers suggests that there's a significantly smaller population of 15-20 year olds coming up than there are right now, so we should expect slower growth. 17MM 18-24 year olds is already an enormous percentage of the 22MM 18-24 year olds available in the US, so growth has to be far more difficult there.
Younger generation moving away: Yes, they probably are moving to other services. They're probably tired of Facebook. They're probably just growing up and discovering FB isn't the end all be all of social networking. There's also a huge growth in Twitter that's continuing as 18 - 25 move from Facebook...coincidence?
According to a 2009 Nielsen Report people using Twitter tend to trend older: 42% of Twitter users are in the 35 - 49 age range. The next largest group are the 25 - 34 years olds making up 20% of users. What I'm suggesting here is that users moving out of college and into the workforce are noticing they're colleagues are using services like Twitter, end up spending less time on FB (also b/c FB is often blocked more so than Twitter), and as a result they drop their accounts on FB or stop using it all together.
With regards to the 55+ generation and FB, the jury is still out on whether FB likes that or not. It's apparent that they're new move to making more information public, "fanning a person," etc are all aimed at mimicking what Twitter is doing. They see they're original audience shifting away to a different service, so they're attempting to play in that same field.
However, I think Facebook should grab onto the 55+ market hitting their site. The "older" generation tends to be less finicky when it comes to social media and social networking (dropping in and out of services). They're also not typically associated with ease of change and prefer to use what works for them..."if it ain't broke, don't fix it." This is good for Facebook since they're starting to gain a larger audience that will probably NOT move away in the future. Also considering the large growth of 55+ approaching, they're going to be gaining even more of that same market. And if I know my own 55+ family members well, I would say that age group is willing to spend money on services without hesitation!
Facebook may need to amend the site with new ways for people to purchase products based upon their status updates, notes, videos, etc and integrate more with online shopping retailers such as Amazon, Ebay, etc to help tap into that 55+ market if they want to make money down the line. But I certainly think Facebook should take a hard look at serving that age segment as well. Give them a place to come to and they will. The 55+ also like to keep in touch with family, friends, etc more so than the 18 - 25 and probably much more engaged in keeping in touch rather than getting hundreds and hundreds of tweets each day. Ignorning that segment would be a bad thing for Facebook.
I, as a recent graduate, do not use Facebook anymore because of e-mail. I would say that most of high school, and college, students have not discovered e-mail yet, as email is used a lot in corporate America. Ever since I started working, where I had to use e-mail all the time, I switched to e-mailing friends instead of going to Facebook. A few of my friends have done the same thing.
WOW - fascinating stuff, guys! Old people use Facebook OMG!!!!!!
I'd bet facebook is questioning its decision to depart from its strictly student requirements. When a college student's uncle, pastor, nephew, or grandmother are sending friend requests, it no longer functions in the same way. Facebook worked best for college students when everything said was between fellow students. It was its own secluded world which granted users more personal freedom. News feeds have only served to increase the publicity. They were bound to lose that demographic with how public the site has gotten.
Now that relatives, community leaders, and future employers are on facebook (some employers are known to check facebook before hiring), that intimate freedom is lost. The site is still being used as a networking tool, but college students don't want to have to watch what they say. For substantial social activity, they're going offline.
My question is: how long will facebook continue to be a powerhouse? Sure its membership is blossoming, but with an older demographic who is certain to first, spend less personal time on the site than students and second, lose interest in the sight within a few years or months.
Talking from my surrounding... a lot of young kids have left Facebook because they don't want their parents using it and having all their relatives checking up on them and their friends. Facebook might had "boomed" when ti opened up to everyone but at the same time it slowly started killing its true original users which were college students.
Where are they going? Twitter, Blogging, SMS mostly. No true place to go right now but I'm sure something will pop up sooner or better. It was the same for MySpace as soon as "old" people started joining it stopped being a cool place to be.
You may want to check out what Danah Boyd has said about facebook as of late. She seems to be tracking the online youth trends and has this to add to your conversation.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/30/pdf_talk_the_no.html
Big fan of you guys
Kevin Burrell
Facebook has been stagnant in feature set for awhile. I have always been struck by the general crappiness of Facebook compared to other social networking sites. Facebook is a prime example of the network effect. However, once other better services reach critical mass they will have their own network effect. Facebook's relentless copying of Twitter is an admission that this has already happened. But Facebook will find, as MySpace already has, that copying is not an acceptable substitute for innovation...
Many of the comments here address my reaction. Mr. Kirkpatrick is showing his bias when he claims there is something "not pretty" about this. As noted, smart business people can target whatever market they can accurately measure and respond to. Moreoever, older people have much more money and much more discretionary money.
A much better and far more thoughtful reaction would be to simply consider what the changing demographics of Facebook means for the business. How can they respond most productively?
Bad analysis. The absolute growth in HS and college kids is represented in the age category, and it is growing.
The issue is self disclosure issue. The enrollment bucket is a self-select category. Further proven by the 291% growth in unknown gender.
The issue is people are sharing less with Facebook. Or, there are a lot of spammers setting up shop.
I'm not at all surprised about the above. I'm one of the old fogies who has gone to Facebook recently. I'm much bigger on LinkedIn, but I am finding Facebook has some good business uses.
With a little tweaking, I could picture Facebook becoming a tough competitor for LinkedIn. Most of the social sites are falling over themselves for the young crowd. But for both of my bisinesses, ECI Biotech Recruiters and www.PharmaceuticalJobSite.com I actually pay LinkedIn a montly fee for expanded priviliges on their site. How many kids are sending Facebook money for the same?
It may be that Facebook realizes a business model that includes user fees as well as advertising is better than one based on advertising alone. And the only people willing to pay user fees are business users, not kids.
The death of Facebook? Probably at some point...
As much as the death of e-mail have been predicted for a couple of years..
And the death of blogs...
Of course Facebook is UN-cool! People who hardly know how to use a computer, know how to use FB =D
Young kids haven't gone anywhere (yet), but the late adapters are here to stay I guess...
Now, I'm just wondering - any numbers on the rest of the world? Or Europe at least? Pretty big market as well ;-)
Numbers and statistics, we can make them say almost anything we want... Here is my view: We can't really say that users in the 18-24 age range are going somewhere else by looking at these numbers alone. There are more users in each age range. We can say for sure that the progression is less aggressive in some age range, but is it that problematic? One thing we have to consider here is that there is a limit to the progression: the total number of people "playing" on the web!!! Now let's look at the percentage of users per range and let's compare them with the percentage for the entire web ecosystem.
(I'm using these numbers for the complete web users: [0-17]:10%, [18-24]:27%, [25-34]:27%, [35-54]: 25%, [55+]:11%)
It really looks like the Facebook numbers are converging to the general web numbers and the only range still "far" from the global numbers is the 55+ range. You can say what you want , but Facebook total global numbers of users are still in fast progression and they will soon hit the limit if they continue at this rate. Young people where early adopters, now 55+ are jumping in the wagon. Google has reached that limit years ago and they are now progressing slowly. Is this just a mainstream universal web application? Going to stay cool enough to retain younger users in the future is certainly something to watch closely. Is it going to generate enough money? Is it less attractive to advertisers? Facebook high valuation is based on the assumption that it is a very good platform to reach the right people at the right place at the right time. So the percentage of users in each age range doesn’t matter that much if the total number of users in each age range is high enough.
P.S. The educational level numbers are too weird to be commented at all.
Isn't this what happened to AOL? All the kids were using it (via the free floppy disks and CDs) and then parents and grandparents started using it and the rest is history..
It's interesting how facebook wants to be more open, but personally, it's only appeal is that it's closed. As facebook becomes more open and becomes more like the internet at large why do we need facebook at all? Is it the 2009 internet on training wheels (aka AOL)?
Isn't it possible that we are seeing a summer time drop off? School is out, kids might me transitioning from one school to another, and perhaps we are just seeing a slowdown that will reverse itself come September.
Another positive trend might be that parents are getting involved with facebook to better understand what it's all about and see what their kids are up to, not in the sense of spying on them but, rather, seeing what all the fuss is about.
Just two possible theories. I have seen no evidence of any competing service talking away the mojo of facebook. Not saying it WON'T happen, but I would need to see some evidence that it's imminent. People LOVE to proclaim the death of everything online. Here's a news flash: people still use e-mail and they probably always will.
I suspect there are other factors at play here, but it's just my feeling.
The strangest thing about the numbers is not that facebook is losing high school aged users, its that there are fewer people identifying themselves as being in high school. That may be a fine point, but it is a significant one. It is also not surprising that the rate of growth among 0-17 year-old users is far slower than the 55+ age range. As facebook becomes more mainstream more people will use it and the largest growth sector will be were there were no active users to begin with.
My 2 cents:
http://jordanwillms.posterous.com/facebooks-own-estimates-show-declining-studen-0
Looks like the numbers are up for High School and College age individuals is up but current enrollment are down.
Economy? Privacy settings? People not listing their schools anymore? Combination of the three I'd imagine...
I think one of @MOOBER 's points above is insightful. The data seems to show a clear story about the student demographic - The age demographic 18-24 shows absolute growth. However, his point about the "unknown gender" growth of 291% doesn't show WHO isn't sharing that data. I would think it more likely that the 55+ growth (generally less tech savvy - no offense) would account for the bulk of the "lack of disclosure" issue. I know many 55+ers from my family that joined Facebook recently and never uploaded profile pic or filled out their profiles. it's just a foreign concept to them. Also...why is no one here raving about the 10915% growth in "unknown age" growth in this discussion - that highlights the lack of disclosure problem. Are people just freaked out about privacy?
Why only gather US info?
There's a great big world out there and most marketers, charities and other orgs want to sell to them to.
This US centric data isn't all that helpful to a good many of us. The USA youth market was not the fastest to embrace FB, Canada was. So what are Canadian youth doing? How are Canadian boomers and GenX'ers responding?
Marshall, are these logins or registered users? It seems to me that Matthew has hit the nail on the head: summer vacation. I'm sure if its logins they will jump way back up again at the end of august.
"As you can see in the chart above, young people by age are up a small amount, but young people by school level are down. Users with undeclared education levels are way up, implying that many high school and college students may simply no longer be listing their schools at all on the site."
This is the detail the Twittersphere is omitting when tweeting this story.
Then again, this posts own headline "Facebook's Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users" is itself misleading ;)
Reminds me of what the city did at the beach. They wanted more older people to go to the beach, wanted to make it family friendly, so they played Lawrence Welk on the loud speakers after the bars closed to disperse the crowds. Also passed other laws targeting the young. So what happened the youngsters left. now the once great beach is nothing more than a tourist destinations, and locals refuse to go to it. The youngsters now drive 2 hrs to another beach who welcomes them. I refuse to go. They took the fun out of it.
Facebook should not cater to either demographic. Many of the users like having grandparents along with friends on facebook.
Also kids today know that businesses are looking at these social sites in determining hiring. That may be a reason for a drop in the number of young people. Older adults 55+ mostly don't have to worry about being turned down for a job because of something on their profile.....
Just my 2 cents.
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