“It’s very much motivated by what we see the next generation wanting from social media. He calls it the era of “social discovery.” “And about two years ago we said no - our entire product line needs to change and evolve and adapt to the needs of the young adults.” “We used to have a team at Facebook that was focused on younger cohorts, or maybe there was a project or two that was dedicated to coming up with new ideas,” Alison said. Tom Alison, who serves as the head of Facebook (Zuckerberg’s title is now Meta CEO), sounded optimistic when he outlined the platform’s plans to lure in young adults in an interview with The Associated Press. “It is still a very powerful platform around the world.”ĪOL was once powerful too, but its user base has aged and now an aol.com email address is little more than a punchline in a joke about technologically illiterate people of a certain age. “The fact that we are talking about Facebook being 20 years old, I think that is a testament of what Mark developed when he was in college. It reached a billion daily users in 2015.ĭebra Aho Williamson, an analyst with Insider Intelligence who’s followed Facebook since its early days, notes that the site’s younger users have been dwindling but doesn’t see Facebook going anywhere, at least not any time soon. While some rivals emerged - remember Orkut? - they generally petered out as Facebook soared, seemingly unstoppable despite scandals over user privacy and a failure to address hate speech and misinformation adequately. Positioning himself a visionary, Zuckerberg refused to sell Facebook and pushed his company through the mobile revolution. It didn’t help MySpace’s fate that it was sold to stodgy old News Corp. Rival MySpace, which launched only a year earlier, quickly became outdated as the cool kids flocked to Facebook. For nearly a decade, Facebook was the place to be, the cultural touchstone, the thing constantly referenced in daily conversations and late-night TV, its founding even the subject of a Hollywood movie. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the main source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background - utilitarian but boring, like email.
Yet it still finds itself in a battle for relevancy, and its future, after two decades of existence.įor younger generations - those who signed up in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it’s decidedly not the place to be. That’s more than a third of the world’s population. Today, 3 billion people check it each month. For those who came of age around the time Mark Zuckerberg launched from his Harvard dorm room in 2004, it’s been inextricably baked into daily life - even if it’s somewhat faded into the background over the years.įacebook faces a particularly odd challenge. The once-cool social media platform born before the iPhone is approaching two decades in existence.
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