Where are Facebook’s missing teens? On YouTube!

Facebook’s missing teens have been found – watching videos on YouTube! The social media giant’s fantastic results last month, where it showed a remarkable bounce back in total quarterly earnings and beat all analyst expectations, were still seen as a cause for concern once CFO David Ebersman announced a decline in the daily usage from its teenage market segment. 

The announcement triggered an immediate loss of confidence by investors, resulting in volatile share prices. Reuters As Firstpost columnist Samir Alam noted earlier, the youthful consumer spending is a large source of earnings for any online platform. Promoting products such as fashion, technology and other lifestyle brands on its platform builds Facebook’s credibility for advertisers. 

According to the report: The last year however has witnessed a drop in Facebook’s standing as the top choice for younger users, falling to 23 percent in 2013 from last years 44 percent according to financial firm Piper Jaffray. The youth consumer spending market makes up more than $200 billion in the United States alone and is of significant interest to investors and companies everywhere. 

Competing with other social networking platforms for younger consumers has also been a challenge over the last year for Facebook and has not given investors any comfort. The current announcement coupled with last weeks policy changes on Facebook, allowing younger teens to publicly share their content on the platform, demonstrates an already in motion strategy by Facebook executives to tackle the declining appeal Facebook seems to have developed amongst the much desired younger demographic.

 Be as it may however, the question that many people were asking was, if not Facebook, then where are those teens? The answer as it turns out, is YouTube! Mashable has got exclusive access to a report by The Futures Company, a research consultancy, which interviewed 4014 teenagers to find the answer to just that question. And according to the report, the most popular site among all teens now is YouTube. Fifty percent of teens surveyed cited YouTube as their favorite site versus 45.2 percent for Facebook. It further added that 41.6 percent of those aged 12 to 15 said Facebook was their favorite website, as compared to 48 percent of teens overall.

 Last year, Facebook was the most popular site among 12- to 15-year-olds. This data if anything, should only worry Facebook more. More so because the report quotes Rob Callender, the director of youth insights at Futures Company as saying that the data suggests parental controls aren’t the issue. Rather,” says Callender, “it appears Facebook might not be creating as many new fanatics as it once did.”

Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/tech/where-are-facebooks-missing-teens-on-youtube-1215819.html?utm_source=ref_article