Facebook Losing Key Demographic of 18 to 35 Year Olds?

One bad month in June 2010 and a lot of people called the top. The headline was early. The direction was right.

On July 21, 2010, Facebook announced 500 million users. The next day, IndustryPace asked whether it was losing the people advertisers cared about most. Both things were true at once, which is the most Facebook thing imaginable.

What set it off

In early July, Inside Facebook reported that US growth had stalled in June 2010. New US users fell to about 320,800 for the month, down from 7.8 million in May, and most of the drop came from the 18 to 44 core. Inside Facebook guessed it was a summer lull. Wired suggested the US market was simply full. Either way, the age group that buys things had stopped showing up.

The backdrop: Pew found in early 2010 that 72% of online 18 to 29 year olds used social networks, and among young adults with profiles, 71% were on Facebook while 66% were still on MySpace. By the end of 2010, comScore showed Facebook's audience getting older, with the 55-plus share rising and the 35 to 54 share falling.

How it aged

The June 2010 dip was temporary. Facebook kept growing for years, so as a call, the headline was early and overstated.

As a direction, it was dead on. The "young people are leaving Facebook" story came back every year until it stopped being a story and became the business plan. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012. The young audience went to Instagram, then Snapchat, then TikTok. The company that owns the most valuable social audience in the world spent a decade buying the places its own users were escaping to.

This page rebuilds a July 2010 IndustryPace post whose original text is not available. Data comes from Inside Facebook as reported by WARC, Pew Research (February 2010), comScore and CNN Money. No sustained 2010 decline in 18 to 35 users was found in the record; the page says so.