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Teenagers ditching Facebook for messenger apps

LONDON — 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; they’re just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards the next big thing.

LONDON — 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; they’re just not using it as much as they did. It was a landmark statement, since teens are the demographic who often point the rest of us towards 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 mums, dads, 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 kids’ 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 mobiles.

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 (S$29 billion) in SMS 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 too.

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 per cent 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 per cent of all smartphones in Spain. The power users and early adopters of these apps, the ones you’re most likely to see tapping their thumbs over a tiny screen, are under 25.

Part of the reason is that gradual encroachment of the grey-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 recurring criticism of young people — that their social lives are largely virtual — when many more are in fact embracing the virtues of privacy and services like WhatsApp, which shun advertising.

“I only use WhatsApp to communicate and send pics these days,” said Ms Natalie West, a twentysomething financial sales associate in London. In the last few years she has used Facebook less and less because she doesn’t want “the whole world to know” what she’s doing.

When people set up events and get-togethers on Facebook, Ms West and her boyfriend tend to reply on WhatsApp instead because “it’s more personal”. For similar reasons, some 78 per cent 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 United Kingdom 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 5 million active monthly users, the service has inevitably become a favoured way for teens to send sexy or even naked photos of themselves, an ill-advised practice known as “sexting”.

But 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$2-4 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 future for these messaging apps is still uncertain. Some in the industry expect buyouts from big internet companies like Google, which was rumoured to have flirted with WhatsApp earlier this year. Facebook already has its own popular Messenger service, while Apple has iMessage — both are popular, but lack the gaming ambitions of Asian chat apps. Still, it is hard to imagine these players consolidating to create a global social network as big as Facebook.

“If you look at the landscape, it’s geographic,” says Mr Greg Woock, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the United States calling and messaging service Pinger. “We dominate the US, WhatsApp dominates Europe, LINE owns Japan.”

China’s WeChat is trying to break out of that mould. Its executives have talked about expanding internationally, and custom building its app to suit local tastes for how it should look.

“We have put a lot of thought into how to take it outside of China,” Mr Martin Lau, the president of WeChat owner Tencent, said at a recent conference.

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 do so.

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’re still a world away from the US$2.1 billion in sales that Facebook brought in this last quarter.

But there is little doubt that millions of teens will use these apps more and more, and older demographics will eventually join them. There’s a good chance that will continue to be at the expense of Facebook. THE GUARDIAN

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