The Facebook Age Distribution

I read Kottke's post and his follow-up last week and the question he asks has been ratting around in my brain ever since. Is Facebook the new AOL?

I've been debating his posts in private with a number of people and one of them, Jarid Lukin, the creator of the word freemium among other things, said the following to me:

But, the bigger issue with Facebook to me is the reliance on the college market.  I know they've opened up membership recently, but their user base is predominantly still college kids (and the TechCrunch crowd).

Jarid runs a web-based business that targets a different sector than the college crowd so he is thinking about this through his lens, which we all do. It got me thinking.

I had seen so many of my friends jump onto Facebook recently that I naively assumed it was gaining critical mass among the older crowd.

So I twittered the following message yesterday afternoon:

          Does anyone use facebook other than 15 to 25 year olds and the techcrunch 50,000?

And I got a hit. Rick Stratton sent me this data on his college, Connecticut College.

So that got me thinking that MIT might be a good network to look at. Being that it's my own college network, I did just that. And here are the stats for MIT, going all the way out to 60 year olds.

That peak at the very end of the tail is the 61 years and older group. And it's not entirely accurate as a number of Facebook users like to claim they are 90 years old and such.

What both of these charts show is that Jarid is right. Facebook is still predominantly a 15 to 26 year old service. The usage drops off dramatically once people get above 30 years old (26 years old in the case of Connecticut College).

This will be an interesting data set to come back to in six months time, a year's time, and so on. We'll see if Facebook can move beyond the Techcrunch 50,000 into the mainstream among the older crowd. One thing they have going for them is it appears once you are on Facebook, you don't leave. So time will start to move those numbers up on its own.

Interesting stuff.

Comments

[George Nimeh]

Hi Fred,

Sure, the older crowd isn't signing up in droves for Facebook et al, but is that any surprise? They're not natives, and the idea of online social networks is a foreign concept.

I see no reason to expect a massive behavioral shift towards the adoption and use of social networks by older audiences will occur. Their media consumption and usage patters (as well as their social interaction patterns) are well-established.

I don't think this is about Facebook moving "into the mainstream among the older crowd." Rather, I think the stats to watch and questions to ask are:

What's the sign-up rate of new/younger "natives?" In other words, is it still gaining traction amongst the key user groups?

What's the churn rate of as Facebook members as they get older? Does Facebook stays relevant to them over time or do they move on? In other words, is Facebook (and/or the other social networks) becoming an integral part of people's lives.

BTW, it is fascinating to watch Facebook explode onto the scene here in London and across Europe. And whilst it may be easy for certain US-centric marketers to ignore, the potential for international growth is quite obvious from here.

~G~

[Rick]

Rick Segal?

[fred wilson]

so sorry rick, i shouldn't be blogging when the train is coming in ten minutes!

i fixed it.

thanks again for the data.

fred

[Rick Burnes]

Where did the network data come from? Am I missing a way to get it from Facebook network pages?

[Brian P Halligan]

Useful article for marketers who are trying to figure out how to get to these demographics. I personally was surprised to see the usage continue so far after college and surprised again to see the rapid dropoff.

It would be interesting future foddor to do a similar article in the future which compared facebook's demographic with myspace's in a similarly analytical way.

Just so you know, I posted a link to your article on www.dailyhub.com

Bh

[matt schulte]

Even if it is "reliant on the college market"...isn't that a market that gets a fresh infusion of potential users every year...guaranteed?

[Robert Seidman]

i find the AOL comparisons laughable in general. AOL at its peak had 20M+ subscribers paying ~$20/mo. on top of its advertising revenue. Even today's AOL between subscription and ad revenue dwarfs and I mean ABSOLUTELY DWARFS the topline revenues for MySpace and Facebook COMBINED.

15-26 seems to be the sweetspot for these service right now and while it's already fairly easy to predict that actual usage will go down with age (jobs, marriages, kids, etc), I can't make a prediction about whether these 15-26 year olds will still be loyal to these services in the coming years. But if I had to bet right now I'd bet hugely against any loyalty for these services in even 5 years.

Over a 1 year horizon I'd probably be "long" on these services, but I'd be afraid to go too far past that time horizon right now.

While it's much too early to tell whether the social networks as they currently exist are the pet rocks, mood rings and beanie babies of the Internet, it's also too early to tell that they are not.

P.S. I think Apple is the new AOL!

[Wayne Mulligan]

I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg here -- Facebook was created for students originally, the "Freshman Facebookers" haven't even graduated yet and those students are arguably the ones who will have the most developed social networks out of all of the Facebookers. When they graduate and want to keep in touch with classmates they'll likely be doing it here and not on MySpace or Classmates.com. So right now the average Facebook user might fall into a very narrow age range, but going forward I think "the book" has more growth potential than any other community site out there.

[Jarid]

Do you have any more details on this data? How is a "user" defined? It needs to be more than just someone who has created a profile. I'm 30, and have a Facebook profile, but haven't had any real Faceook activity for ages.

I think George hits on the real point as to the churn rate of (active) Facebook users. By definition, any one targetting the college market has a customer lifespan of just 4 years. Do the users continue to use Facebook after college or do they "graduate" to LinkedIn, Geni, etc?

[Robert John Ed]

Worrying about revenue for a site like this in comparison to AOL is a bit premature as of now. Worry about making money later.

Right now, worry about making the service a nonnegotiable aspect of a users internet experience. AOL was a walled garden and it played on peoples lack of understanding, brilliant but devious. Facebook is nothing similar to that and either is Apple.

What's exciting here is the potential. Potential that as the youth grows this service will grow with them and completely alter the landscape of using the web. Will this happen? With Zucks undying focus on the user, it's completely possible. When he starts to focus on "topline revenues" is when the user suffers, and the service as a whole declines.

Attempting to label Facebook or Myspace as the "new" whatever is a crutch, and a broken one at that.

[Greg]

Great point about people not leaving. I was in one of the first "Facebook generations" in college and I've seen my friends use it more since graduating to keep in touch. If Facebook stays as strong as it is today, at worse they'll just have to wait for us users to grow up. Not a bad spot to be in.

[Dorrian]

I can add that in Canada (a market Facebook acknowledges is its fastest growing), I have a growing number of high school friends - 1990 - that are on Facebook. I have been reunited with about 20 people I have not spoken to in 17 years, and they do not read Techcrunch.

[P-Air]

In speaking to my wife, who is a new Facebook user, and several of my friends (40+ yr olds) living in areas outside of NYC or the SF Bay Area, that they will never really get into Facebook as it has passed their generation. Sure, they try to keep up w/their friends but they don't yet think in terms of the value of publishing these facts in a way that their friends can keep up w/them. In one sense, they don't believe they have anything any one would want to know about and secondly, they don't believe they have the time to spend doing that "Facebook thing".

They don't realize the amount of effort they go through to keep up their distance challenged relationships. They don't realize that others *do* want to keep up w/their happenings. It's just not in their consciousness, but it will be in their kids'. Hence, I'm much less worried about the age groups that will jump into Facebook, and would only seek to keep up w/stats on use of those that grew up using Facebook. If that number falls off, then that's something to worry about.

[ekc]

I agree that Facebook can't really be judged based on the amount of older people that have signed up for it. I'm only six years out of college and it still took me a while to sign up for it, after suffering from social network fatigue from already having a Friendster account and being convinced to sign up for Myspace as well. Other people earlier have already said this, but they are absolutely right, the things to keep track of are how many younger people keep signing up each year as they start college/high school and how many of the older people keep using it after they graduate college. Unless Facebook screws something up royally (always a possibility), the way Friendster did by not fixing the speed and Myspace started to do by blocking services when News Corp bought it, I wouldn't be surprised to see the numbers of people using it that are more than 5-7 years out Conn College and MIT keep growing, and the fat part of those graphs keep working its way to the right. I'm in a fickle age group though, so there's always that caveat as well. I agree that it will be interesting to look at that graph in 3-5 years.

[nick davis]

Great post. You should really look at the geographical distribution as well. I am 30 years old in Kansas City, and recently signed up for an account. After dumping my address book in, I couldn't find a single contact. Not one.

My LinkedIn network is 80+ of people I know pretty well, and grows by 3-4 each week these days. It feels like, here in the Midwest at least, LinkedIn is starting to hit critical mass. I've been a member for over 3 years, and I now see the network effect like the west coast saw 2 years ago.

[proales]

Who cares if everyone in the world uses Facebook?

Advertisers crave the attention of the 16-24 year olds - they pay massive premiums for it.

Facebook may well be worth more with 24M college students using it (at a enormous penitration rate amoung college students) then with 240M regular joe's + college students using it.

[Michael Parekh]

Fred,
I think I've seen some numbers from Facebook that suggest that 60% of their 25 million or so registereds came on after they opened up the service to non-college populations.

Which would imply about 10 million or so college members.

[Robert Seidman]

Proales can you please share where you got your data from re: advertisers "crave the attention of 16-24 years olds - they pay massive premiums for it."

I'm well versed in the advertisers loving 18-49 segment (especially the higher income per household portion), but I'd love to see the data on premiums paid by advertisers for the 16-24 space you describe. Thanks!

[rick]

Those Conn College numbers are just the number of alumni who have Facebook profiles, it's not regular users.

You can look at any alum/student body data by searching for "classmates", leaving the name field blank and then browsing by year.

[Ian McAllister]

Lovin' the FB stats Fred, keep them coming.

I'm also interested in tracking Facebook's growth and trying to tease apart the natural growth they would have already gotten, growth by defections from other SNS, and new incremental growth produced by opening up the platform.

[ted]

Advertisers do not LOVE college kids. They're part of the mix but in general their income is low, they don't buy in the numbers that those in 24-49 do, because they don't have money and their soulless American lives don't yet revolve around buying stuff other then beer and pizza. (kidding, but just kind of).

In general Facebook is really, really useful but only if A. you have an active social life and B. your friends are already on Facebook. It's like email/IM/calendar/ all in one. That's a great thing and as long as they continue to focus on that, it's going to be a great business for a long time.

It's not a Google type business, or even a Time Warner type business, but it's solid.

Oh, and as for people saying "Worry about making money later," sorry it doesn't work that way. They need to show solid monetization at every stage or the future is not bright. They ARE showing decent monetization right now, and that is part of what is driving the enthusiasm.

[hey]

As far as I can tell, Facebook use is growing VERY rapidly amongst the post college crowd. You will see the curve move right very quickly, because of the huge network effects.

People I know who hate social networking and IM are adding me to their facebook lists. I can barely get them to use email but they're madly facebooking.

The huge advantage in the photo storage and networking should keep people on the site, as long as they don't screw it up with f8 (I've been seeing ridiculous technical problems this week). If you have a very spread out network, facebook is absolutley critical, and the older crowd is adopting it like crazy to keep their far-flung networks together. I'm VERY long FB.

Linked-in only works for a certain demographic. My network SHOULD be in the sweet spot there, but I keep searching and no one I know is there (100s of dupes thanks to my South and East Asian friends, but not the actual people I know). LI is the real TechCrunch 50k ghetto, very useful for VCs, but not as widely spread as it initially seems.

[Shannon Clark]

Fred,

A major factor which is skewing your results is that anyone who left college even as recently as 10 years ago (or less in many school's cases) no longer has a .edu affliated email address.

I no longer have a uchicago.edu address (didn't actually graduate so the alumni office seems to want to ignore me, not an active student so my email address is long dead). This means that on Facebook currently I have no way to actually join the U. Chicago network there.

I'm on facebook, but would not count in your stats (and I'm 33).

I suspect that if you looked carefully at the MIT stats, for example, you would find most of the older Facebook users have a current affiliation with the university (i.e. teach there, went back for grad school) or have had some affiliation fairly recently. Perhaps as more people get alumni addresses etc they may join.

However, it should also be noted that the utility of a network changes with age - when you are in college/just recently graduated, a broad "network" affiliated with that college still has a vital social purpose (literally directing you to the best parties - my only slightly snarky definition of a successful social app).

As you get older and graduates from your school spread out farther and farther, the network which will direct you to the best social events will likely shift - to geographies, to company affiliation, to other memberships and interests.

I suspect if you look at the age ranges in the geographic networks on Facebook you would find a somewhat different story. Among my broad network clearly in the past 3-5 weeks Facebook has taken off (I'm among the people who just recently joined it) and already my network there is a fairly decent representation of actual network - a few college or earlier friends, but mostly people I know from where I have lived/what I do.

Shannon

[Conor]

I would also like to comment on the move towards Facebook outside the US. Here in Ireland Bebo was very popular, now seems to have hit critical mass (at least among the 20-30 year old crowd) and many users are now migrating across to Facebook and bringing their Bebo networks with them. This is very similar to the Facebook/MySpace comparison.. Facebook looks cleaner and more "grown up" than Bebo which appeals to some people who might have felt Bebo was a bit too kiddy or garish. From comments I've seen of younger Bebo users they like the applications on Facebook too.. though in my own list on Facebook I'm seeing a lot of churn of people adding and removing applications.

I think the other key point about Facebook is the staying in touch aspect. It's why Bebo did well over here and why Facebook will do well. You can get back in touch with people you lost touch with as well as maintaining contact with people who are living abroad now etc.

I think Facebook could go either way.. you could say that as people get older they'll use it less due to time constraints (family, work, etc) but perhaps people will use it more for those very reasons! If you don't have time to meet a friend for coffee once a week or whatever, maybe you'll just message them on facebook to see how they're doing instead? Just like downloading tv shows allows us to timeshift when we watch programmes to suit our schedules, social networking allows us to timeshift/placeshift our socialising!

As for LinkedIn.. I like it but it's going to lose out if it doesn't bring in a more social aspect ala the Wall. If more business communities start popping up on facebook it'll be tough for LinkedIn to compete..

[Tom W.]

Fred - two biggish groups not cited:

- nonprofits and their donors/employees - social entrepreneurs and forward-looking NGOs are getting savvy

- people involved in politics, especially Democrats - growth here has been HUGE last 3 months

Both of these trend young, but not college-age or even recent grads - and there are plenty of oldsters to keep us both company