Facebook released its Q3 earnings this week. While there was plenty of positive information in there for Facebook, CFO David Ebersman brought up a decrease in teen engagement during the conference call.
First, he noted, “728 million people used Facebook on an average day in September, up 25% from last year. Growth continues to be driven by mobile. In Q3 for the first time, daily actives on web declined year over year, albeit very modestly.”
He then said, “I want to say a few words about youth engagement on Facebook. As we’ve said previously, this is a hard issue for us to measure because self-reported age data is unreliable for younger users, so we’ve developed other analytical methods to help us estimate usage by age. Our best analysis of youth engagement in the U.S. reveals that usage of Facebook among U.S. teens overall was stable from Q2 to Q3, but we did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens.”
He continued, “We won’t typically call out such granular data, especially when it’s of questionable statistical significance, given the lack of precision of age estimates for younger users, but we wanted to share this with you now since we get a lot of questions about teens. We’re pleased that we remain close to fully penetrated on teens in the U.S. Our monthly user numbers remain steady, and overall engagement on Facebook remains strong. We’ll continue to focus our development efforts to build products that drive engagement for people of all ages.”
This is quite a different tone from the company that we were seeing after its Q2 report back in the summer. Mark Zuckerberg, at the time, brushed off the idea that teens were losing interest in Facebook, saying that teen use had held steady for the past year-and-a-half.
“One specific demographic I want to address is U.S. teens,” he said. “There has been a lot of speculation and reporting that fewer teens are using Facebook. But based on our data, that just isn’t true. It’s difficult to measure this perfectly, since some young people lie about their age. But based on the best data we have, we believe that we are close to fully penetrated in the U.S. teen demographic for a while, and the number of teens using Facebook on both a daily and monthly basis has been steady over the past year-and-a-half.”
“Teens also remain really highly engaged using Facebook,” he added. “Now it’s also worth mentioning that these stats are for Facebook only. Instagram is growing quickly, as well, so if you combine the two services together, we believe our engagement and share of time spent are likely growing quickly throughout the world.”
Obviously something has changed, though Facebook is still high on its Instagram stats (150 million users as of a month ago).
Last month, Facebook made some changes to its privacy policy, enabling teens to be able to post publicly.