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Written by Katie Paul
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Meta Inc said on Friday that its flagship Facebook (NASDAQ:) app is attracting the largest number of young people in three years, as it tries to shake the platform’s reputation as a bastion of the older generation.
More than 40 million American and Canadian adults, ages 18 to 29, now visit Facebook daily, the social media company said, in its first-ever release of such demographic information. Facebook, whose founder Mark Zuckerberg turned 40 last month, celebrated its 20th anniversary this year.
This growth reflects the company’s efforts in the past few years to regain the attention of young people who were flocking to the short-video app TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
A company spokesperson said Meta charted “five quarters of healthy app usage growth” among young people.
At an event in New York aimed at highlighting how young people use the app, Tom Allison, Facebook’s Meta head, said the anniversary prompted executives to realize that Facebook needs to evolve to remain relevant for the next generation.
“Who is Facebook? Is it for my parents?” Allison said, citing questions he said he heard from young people.
Young users seem to come to Facebook initially to use sections like Marketplace, Groups and Dating at important moments in their lives, such as when they need to furnish apartments for the first time, Alison told Reuters in an interview.
He added that although most of these sections did not contain ads, their use was widely increasing engagement.
“Once they get on Facebook, they go and check out things that are going on in the feed or from Reels,” he said, referring to Meta’s TikTok-like short video product.
Facebook, which was founded in a Harvard University dormitory in 2004, spread like wildfire across American college campuses after its launch and quickly became the default mass communications platform for a generation of Internet users. The app has amassed 50 million users within its first three years, and now has 3.2 billion users globally.
However, along the way, it has become less attractive to younger users who drive consumer fads and are considered crucial by advertisers responsible for most Meta ad sales.
Only about a third of American teens say they use Facebook, according to a Pew Research survey last year, a sharp decline from previous surveys the group conducted in 2014 and 2015.
By comparison, the share of all American adults who say they use Facebook has remained relatively constant since 2016 at about 68%, Pew said.
