14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook may be the biggest social network at the moment and still growing at a steady pace but its massive success may have an undesired side-effect as it seems that high-school and college user numbers have dropped in the last six months by 15 percent and 20 percent respectively. This, while the number of users over 55 has seen a huge increase of 513 percent.
The numbers come from consulting firm iStrategyLabs, which looked at the public statistics the company provided self-serving advertisers with. It then compared the latest data with data from six months ago and found that, while Facebook was still growing fast, the younger demographics were actually leaving the site, being replaced with their parents and grandparents. Facebook users over 55 years old now number six million, a five-fold increase in the last six months, while those between 35 and 54 years old now make up 28.2 percent of the whole user base, becoming the largest age group on the social network.
“The most troubling statitics [sic.] we’ve seen are that there are 16.5% less high school users, and 21.7% less college users. There have been rumors that these younger user groups are being aliented [sic.] by their parents joining the service, and this data seems to prove it,” Peter Corbett, iStrategyLabs CEO, wrote.
However, apart from the dodgy spelling, there are other problems with the claims that shed some doubt over their accuracy. While the data shows that the number of users who selected “High School” or “College” as their current enrollment has dropped, the numbers of those under 17 years old and of those between 18 and 24 years old have actually increased by 24.2 percent and 4.8 percent respectively. Facebook has apparently stated that the numbers provided to advertisers were “rough" and it would use internal measuring to verify their accuracy.