Facebook Sees Most Young Adult Users In Three Years

Meta Platforms said its Facebook app is currently attracting its highest number of young adults in three years, as the platform, which marked its 20th anniversary this year, sought to reassure advertisers that it remains relevant to a younger generation.

More than 40 million US and Canadian adults aged 18 to 29 check Facebook daily, Meta said in its first-ever release of such demographic information.

The company said it had seen five quarters of “healthy” usage growth amongst young adults.

Facebook became a standard means of communication for a generation following its launch in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, but more recently has fought for the attention of younger users who have been drawn by competitors such as short video app TikTok.

Younger users

Facebook has some 3.2 billion users, but only about one-third of US teenagers said they used it in a survey last year by Pew, a sharp decline compared with figures from 2014 and 2015.

The share of US adults who say they use Facebook has remained about the same since that period at around 68 percent, the study found.

In April Meta worried Wall Street investors with plans for heavy spending on artificial intelligence (AI), triggering a slide in its share price that wiped about $190 billion (£149bn) from its market value.

Co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on the call that spending on AI would have to grow “meaningfully” before the company could make “much revenue” from AI services as it seeks new sources of growth.

AI investments

Meta has begun building AI into Facebook, where it is for example used to summarise user comments, and offers AI-generated responses to queries in Facebook Messenger.

For the first quarter ended 31 March 2024 Meta posted a net profit up 117 percent to $12.4bn from $5.7bn in the same quarter a year earlier.

Revenues rose 27 percent $36.5bn from $28.6bn a year earlier. Meta generates 98 percent of its revenue from digital advertising.