[freehunter]

Leave, or never sign up? The thing about people is that they age. Someone who fell into the 18-24 category could very well be in the 25-34 category three years later (that category showed growth). While certainly not all of the people aged themselves out of the categories with the most negative growth, I'm left to wonder how many of them did. Say 1 million 16 year olds are now 19 year olds. With no new signups, this would leave 1 million fewer 13-17 year olds and 1 million more 18-24 year olds. In that same time frame, 2 million 23 year olds are now 26 year olds. This leaves a negative on the 13-17 category as well as a negative on the 18-24, but a positive on the 25-34 category.

Obviously my numbers are completely made up and hardly reflect reality. But as it stands, this is pretty meaningless data to draw the conclusion that 3 million teens have left Facebook. The only conclusion is that 3 million Facebook users are no longer teenage Facebook users (either no longer teenagers or no longer Facebook users). If teens are aging themselves out of the "teen" category and the younger generation isn't signing up to fill their place, that's not the same as "leaving" Facebook.

[munificent]

I think your analysis is the right way to look at it. Given how hard it is to actually leave Facebook, what this statistic probably means is "3 million fewer 13-year-olds joined Facebook than the number of 17-year-old Facebook users last year.

It does show that Facebook's demographics are skewing older. But I believe it's because their population is aging, not that existing users are leaving.

[shalmanese]

Facebook only reports DAU and MAU stats for users so leaving is easy. It just means not logging in for a month.

[poopsintub]

How does twitter report usage? I bet 50% of their users don't log in month-after-month if they wanted to skew that data.

[waylandsmithers]

The narrative makes sense. When I was in college, the mindset was that you HAD to be on facebook. Now, I'm not so sure teenagers want to volunteer information and photos that their parents might see, since they're probably already on facebook, especially when there are a million other social apps that crush the facebook experience on mobile.

I think information on usage would be more useful here, since deleting your profile is kind of dramatic, and why burn all the connections you already have, raise red flag to employers etc. and I feel that most who want to abandon facebook simply don't check it or post anything.

[dhughes]

ctrl+F "mobile" you are the only person to mention it.

I can't see any reason why anyone these days let alone very (also) mobile teens would want to be on a service such as Facebook that seems to me so static and verbose.

CBC Radio here in Canada had a professor on who studied people in their early 20s at the university and one incident they mentioned was a class where students had to call businesses to ask about a wanted ads. These students were so unaccustomed to speaking on a telephone they were terrified to the point where some quit the class rather than speak to someone on the phone.

I think young people, say under 30, use Twitter and Snapchat and whatever IM service etc. as their means of communication not as a social entertainment; it's their sole means of communicating. To them it's an essential service a way to communicate so some ad filled overly complicated website is useless to them.

[adamdavis]

This is a minor digression, but I just have to know - have things gotten so bad that not having a facebook profile actually raise a red flag to an employer or is what you're saying just conjecture?

[waylandsmithers]

I think it's kind of like house hunting. Sometimes you'll see listings where there is only one photo, and it's of the outside of the house. You can't help but wonder about what they have to hide, right? If it had a huge kitchen and nice bathrooms, wouldn't they want to put these on display?

It's obviously not fair to treat job candidates this way, but in a world where social media exists, I can understand it being difficult for this thought to not cross the mind of an employer.

http://news.yahoo.com/job-seekers-getting-asked-facebook-pas...

[johnchristopher]

In my experience it's slowly becoming a 'weird' flag but linkedn is more often cited as weirder flag.

[sliverstorm]

25-34 is definitely the most conspicuous group to me, simply because Facebook was brand-new, red-hot, & in vogue when the younger end of this demographic was in college (the original target market).

[VLM]

Also need to discuss demographic trends. I'm not sure of the exact stats and too many spammy content farms to find the numbers, but I believe there's fewer teens and more baby boomer "folks" category people.