Fearing the loss of its young ‘pipeline’

The photo-sharing app, which Facebook owns, was widely hailed as a hit with young people and celebrated as a growth engine for the social network.

But even as Zuckerberg praised Instagram, the app was privately lamenting the loss of teenage users to other social media platforms as an “existential threat,” according to a 2018 marketing presentation. By last year, the issue had become more urgent, according to internal Instagram documents obtained by The New York Times. “If we lose the teen foothold in the U.S. we lose the pipeline,” read a strategy memo, from last October, that laid out a marketing plan for this year.

In the face of that threat, Instagram left little to chance. Starting in 2018, it earmarked almost its entire global annual marketing budget — slated at $390 million this year — to targeting teenagers, largely through digital ads, according to planning documents and people directly involved in the process. Focusing so singularly on a narrow age group is highly unusual, marketers said, though the final spending went beyond teenagers and encompassed their parents and young adults.

The Instagram documents, which have not previously been reported, reveal the company’s angst and dread as it has wrestled behind the scenes with retaining, engaging and attracting young users. Even as Instagram was heralded as one of Facebook’s crown jewels, it turned to extraordinary spending measures to get the attention of teenagers. It particularly emphasised a category called “early high school,” which it classified as 13- to 15-year-olds.

Any slip by Instagram could have larger consequences for Facebook. The social network hoped that Instagram would entice more young people to all of its apps, replenishing Facebook’s aging user base, according to the documents. But the documents also show that Facebook has since abandoned aspirations of becoming a teen destination, just as Instagram has increasingly debated how to hang on to youthful audiences.

The disclosures underscore how much is at stake for Facebook as it seeks to address an outcry in Congress and from the public over Instagram’s effects on users’ mental health. According to separate documents from a Facebook whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, which The Wall Street Journal published, Facebook has known that some teenage girls reported feeling worse about their body image when using Instagram. Haugen testified at a Senate hearing this month that Facebook deliberately kept people, including children, hooked to its services.

Instagram’s fears about losing young users also highlights how much the internet industry prizes them — and how elusive their attention can be, even for an app that is itself young. Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012, is less than 12 years old. It has plenty of cachet with teenagers, but rivals such as TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app, and Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging app, keep nipping at its heels.

Instagram, with more than 1.3 billion users, remains the biggest of those platforms, with TikTok at one billion users and Snapchat at 500 million, according to data from the companies. But in a survey this year from the financial services firm Piper Sandler, 35 percent of teenagers said Snapchat was their favourite social media platform, with 30 percent saying TikTok. Instagram was third with 22 percent.

“In any media industry, the newest, coolest thing sees the highest uptake among younger generations,” said Brooke Duffy, an associate professor at Cornell University who studies media, culture and tech. That puts incumbents on the defensive, she said, adding, “We’re in a cultural moment where people just seem to be getting tired of the aspirational, performative culture of Instagram.”