Data for META Post: Pew Research Center Report Link and Comments

Additional data on teen use of social media apps. This is a follow up to yesterday's post on Meta.

The pdf of the Pew Research Center report "Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022" released on 8/10/22 is available here. 

My notes:

1. I believe the predecessor of TikTok was musical.ly. I didn't see that mentioned in the Pew study. 

2. Only those ages 13-17 were polled, not those who reached the age of majority.

3. Several services that were in the prior 2014-15 poll no longer exist. These include Vine and Google+.

4. The number of teens who use Facebook "almost constantly" is 2%. Not having seen the report yesterday before my post, this subtlety obviously was not considered. You might see this as a possible source of expansion for Facebook (from 2% to 100% is a 50x multiple!). But I think it is a clear sign that Facebook is on the way out.

5. The number of teens who use any one service "almost constantly" is 19% or less, with YouTube most popular. If we assume that usage "almost constantly" is mutually exclusive, then we can add the amounts for each service:

YouTube  19%
TikTok  16%
Instagram  10%
Snapchat  15% 
Facebook  2%
total  62%

This leaves at most a 50% gain in teen use from current levels. 

6. It's probably the case that perceptions of what teens use lags, as it certainly does for this writer. I had not tracked that Facebook use among teens had fallen so far, or that Instagram was poised for further retreat among teens.

7. It's useful to notice just how much turbulence there is in social media choices overall. The only platform that shows long term stability is YouTube. DCF modeling of income from social media should use shortened durations of earnings.

8. Only 32% of teens "ever use" Facebook. This is a significant decline. It matches what has been said about Facebook before in other places, and it's old news that adults crowded into Facebook to such an extent that it became uncool. I'm in danger of being seriously uncool just mentioning such horribly stale information.