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America's Teens Are Choosing YouTube Over Facebook (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the slim-pickings dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Three years ago, Facebook was the dominant social media site among U.S. teens, visited by 71 percent of people in that magic, trendsetting demographic. Not anymore. Now only 51 percent of kids ages 13-17 use Facebook, according to Pew Research Center. The world's largest social network has finally been eclipsed in popularity by YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook Inc.-owned Instagram. Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube is the most popular, used by 85 percent of teens, according to Pew.

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 most frequent destination. Meanwhile, only 10 percent of teens said Facebook is their most-used online platform. The Pew analysis was based on a survey of 1,058 parents who have a teenager from 13 to 17, as well as interviews with 743 teens themselves. The survey also found that 99% of teens own a smartphone or have access to one, and 45% said they're online "on a near-constant basis."

9 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Social media by AHuxley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Its what old people use to sell stuff to you.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  2. So, we've created a monster by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Back when we were looking fondly toward the future where normal people would be on the Internet, we didn't really think of participants so tremendous that more than a 10th of traffic might go their way. Just as there wasn't only one telephone number that everyone called. But that's what we got. We thought the internet would be a tool for democracy. We we ever f**king wrong.

    Over time, it might turn out that the market flattens out or that distributed social networking really does catch on. I hope. Just reading about the internet as the fiefdom of a dozen companies makes me ill.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:So, we've created a monster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Because everyone was supposed to host their own websites. ISPs shut that down quickly, it can be extremely difficult or near impossible to get ports unblocked so you can host your own services. Every consumer-level internet service agreement I've read says no servers allowed. Distributed services won't catch on until that goes away. And managing your personal website is still too complex. In fact, it was easier in web 1.0 days when you used FrontPage or another WYSIWYS document editor to create pages. They were far easier than managing blog posts or database permissions.

      The internet is still a tool for democracy, you just assumed only smart people who cared would use it. You need to educate people before giving them tools or they'll find ways to use them you didn't expect.

    2. Re:So, we've created a monster by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Plus the question of whether you really want to open a port on your firewall to run your website which you will inevitably want to use any of a number of software packages of very dubious quality, but high user friendliness, and thus expose your entire home network, dick pics, toaster, bank records etc. to some rando hacker on the interwebs? Do you want to pay all that extra money for an SSL cert from someone? Couple that with highly asymmetric bandwidth, and the answer becomes no.

      Your website you pay for someone to host, if it gets hacked and it was important, hopefully you have backups. If it wasn't important, well it's probably gone forever.

      Still, I don't think I'd go back to 1991, AOL and dial-up. The internet changed the world, we just can't have the nice things we thought we could have had.

    3. Re:So, we've created a monster by omnichad · · Score: 3, Insightful

      SSL certs protect your visitors, not you. And you can get free SSL certs from Let's Encrypt that are trusted by every major browser.

  3. That age group shouldn't be using social media by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't let my kids use social media. They're not mature enough to understand what's too much sharing, privacy and the consequences of what you post being forever. It's one thing to watch videos on YouTube and another for revealing everything about themselves to the world to forever see.

  4. Re:Hard to beat cat videos by DigiShaman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nope. VLOGGING brings narcissism to a whole new level! Because Facebook just wasn't enough.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  5. What's not being said by davesays · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think the bigger issue is that while Facebook at least pretends to be bi-directional communication (while gathering and selling); YouTube is just watchers, like TV. There is a huge difference between even perceived interaction and just uptake. This large-scale de-socialization of younger people is one of the major factors in the mental health problems of the youth of today.

  6. uhh.. by SuperDre · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You cannot compare youtube to facebook, they're 2 completely different things. Because of that I have no confidence in the people who did the research..