Facebook made a startling admission in its earnings announcement this month: It was seeing a “decrease in daily users, specifically among teens.” In other words, teenagers are still on Facebook, but they are not using it as much as they used to. It was a landmark statement, since teenagers are the demographic who often point the rest of society toward the next big thing.
Their gradual exodus to messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat and KakaoTalk boils down to Facebook becoming a victim of its own success. The road to gaining nearly 1.2 billion monthly active users has seen the mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles of the generation who pioneered Facebook join it too, spamming their walls with inspirational quotes and images of cute animals, and — shock, horror — commenting on their children’s photos.
No surprise, then, that Facebook is no longer a place for uninhibited status updates about pub antics, but an obligatory communication tool that younger people maintain because everyone else does.
All the fun stuff is happening elsewhere: on their mobile phones.
When mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp first emerged in 2009, they looked like a threat to mobile carriers. Everyone from Vodafone to Dutch operator KPN was mentioning them in sales calls.
Mobile operators are estimated to have lost US$23 billion in text message revenue last year due to messaging apps, which host free instant messages through a phone’s data connection, which these days is often unlimited. Now these apps are becoming a threat to established social networks as well.
WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app in the UK and on half the country’s iPhones, according to Mobile Marketing Magazine, has more than 350 million monthly active users globally. That makes it the biggest messaging app in the world by users, with even more active users than social media darling Twitter, which counts 218 million.
About 90 percent of the population of Brazil uses messaging apps, three-quarters of Russians and half of Britons, according to mobile consultancy Tyntec. WhatsApp alone is on more than 95 percent of all smartphones in Spain. The power users and early adopters of these apps, the ones you are most likely to see tapping their thumbs over a tiny screen, are under 25.
Part of the reason is that gradual encroachment of the gray-haired ones on Facebook. Another is what messaging apps have to offer: private chatting with people you are friends with in real life.
Instead of passively stalking people you barely know on Facebook, messaging apps promote dynamic real-time chatting with different groups of real-life friends, real life because to connect with them on these apps you will typically already have their mobile number.
The trend flies in the face of the recurring criticism of young people that their social lives are largely virtual, when many more are embracing the virtues of privacy and services like WhatsApp, which shun advertising.
“I only use WhatsApp to communicate and send pics these days,” said Natalie West, a twenty-something financial sales associate in London.
In the past few years she has used Facebook less and less because she does not want “the whole world to know” what she is doing.
When people set up events and get-togethers on Facebook, West and her boyfriend tend to reply on WhatsApp instead because “it’s more personal.”
For similar reasons, about 78 percent of teenagers and young people use mobile messengers to plan a meet-up with friends, according to research advisory firm mobileYouth.
Another factor is the rise of the selfie, often silly self-portraits taken at arm’s length with a mobile.
Almost half of the photos on Instagram feeds among people aged 14 to 21 in the UK are selfies, according to mobileYouth.
Sending those photos via a mobile messaging service is safer than broadcasting them on Facebook, since they are less likely to be seen by a boss or dozens of Facebook friends you forgot you had.
Selfies are even bigger on Snapchat, the evanescent photo sharing app that deletes a photo several seconds after it has been viewed.
With about 150 million active users, the service has inevitably become a favored way for teens to send sexy or even naked photos of themselves, an ill-advised practice known as “sexting.”
Yet teens also love Snapchat because it allows them to send inane photos of themselves without fear of leaving a permanent digital footprint. The California-based app is seen as so hot, with so much potential for growth, that it has already been pegged with a US$2 billion to US$4 billion valuation in the Silicon Valley tech community.
Estimates are even higher for WhatsApp, which makes money through an annual subscription; Some observers suggest it could be worth US$5 billion or more.
The final, big reason why young people are gravitating toward messaging apps is that many of these apps no longer do just messaging. They are social networks.
The best examples come out of Asia, including messaging platforms like South Korea’s KakaoTalk, China’s WeChat and Japan’s LINE.
All have tens of millions of users, with WeChat boasting more than 200 million, and take their services beyond offering straight messaging to games, stickers and music sharing. Before one writes off digital stickers as inane, they are a decent moneyspinner for LINE: Of the US$58 million the company made in sales in the first quarter of this year, half came from selling games and 30 percent, or approximately US$17 million, from sales of its 8,000 different stickers. Some are free or, in Spain where LINE has 15 million registered users, cost about 1.99 euros (US$2.66).
Often users choose stickers instead of words when they need to express themselves, one LINE executive said.
Gaming is another money-maker. With KakaoTalk, which is thought to be on 90 percent of all smartphones in South Korea, registered users can choose from more than 100 games they can play with one another and games alone helped the company generate US$311 million in sales in the first half.
A couple of non-Asian messaging apps such as Canada’s Kik and the US’ Tango are turning themselves into full-fledged platforms too, inviting software engineers to create games that run on their apps. They will typically let developers take home half the revenue while taking a 20 percent cut. App stores such as Google Play and Apple’s App Store take the remaining 30 percent.
Tango took this a step further this month when it partnered with music streaming service Spotify to allow its 60 million monthly users to share music clips with one another. Two years ago, Spotify launched a similar partnership with Facebook.
“What we’re seeing in the messaging space is an explosion in growth,” said Tom Hsieh, Spotify’s vice president of strategic partnerships, who hinted there would be partnerships with other messaging apps in the future too.
It is worth adding that, with so many of these apps getting into games, stickers and now music sharing, it is becoming harder to define them as messaging services.
“I think there is some misunderstanding here in how we categorize these apps,” said Pavel Durov, who founded Russia’s version of Facebook, VK.com, and recently launched a mobile messaging service called Telegram.
“They are social networks. You have a social graph there; a newsfeed; you have profile pages. Many things that are related to social networks by definition,” durov said.
Social chat apps is another way to define them, Gartner analyst Brian Blau said.
Who dies, survives or thrives may ultimately depend on how well any of these players can make money.
Snapchat, arguably a photo-sharing service more than a messaging app, has yet to explain how it will accomplish this.
WhatsApp says it is already profitable thanks to its annual subscription fees; Pinger relies on advertisements; WeChat, LINE, Kakao and Kik sell stickers and games.
Some of these services are bound to go out of fashion and a few business models will fail, and they are still a world away from the US$2.1 billion in sales that Facebook brought in last quarter.
However, there is little doubt that millions of teens will increasingly use these apps, and older demographics will eventually join them. There is a good chance that will continue to be at the expense of Facebook.
Parmy Olson is a technology writer for Forbes magazine in San Francisco. She is the author of We Are Anonymous.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers