Yahoo Finance's Daniel Howley joins the Live show to discuss why Facebook is seeing a decline among teen users.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Social media giant Meta is continuing to lose its grip on teens as TikTok takes hold, that's at least according to a new report from Pew Research. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley, who is breaking down that report for us today. Dan, this is something that Meta slash Facebook has already warned about. What more does this report give us?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, this is actually something that they're fearing and trying to fight against. And I'll get into how in a moment. But the Pew Research survey, which was done between kids of the ages of 13 to 17 across the US, found that 67% say that they use TikTok. 95% use YouTube-- I'm pretty sure everybody uses YouTube at this point.

But they say that only 32% of teens reported using the standard Facebook app. Now, that is a dramatic drop from when they did the survey in 2014 and 2015 and found that 71% of teens said that they used the app. That was even more than say use TikTok now. Now, TikTok wasn't around in 2014-2015.

And it is worth pointing out that Instagram is still doing well with teens with 62% saying they use it. But again, that's a difference of 5% between TikTok. Other apps that didn't do particularly well-- Twitter with 23%, Twitch with 20%, WhatsApp 17%, Reddit 14%, and Tumblr with 5%. Snapchat with 59% is still up there as far as popularity with teens go.

But, look, this is something that Facebook, Meta, has been trying to fight and fight against. They revamped the Facebook app. They added a new feed that's more algorithmically driven, similar to the For You page from TikTok. That's really what makes TikTok so popular.

And then on Instagram, they were beta testing a new style where they would essentially have the entire video. Take up the whole screen-- basically, just turning it into another TikTok, though that seemed to flop pretty hard when Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner came out and said, where's our Instagram? We want to be able to see pictures of our friends and things along those lines. I'm sure it also didn't help with the ads that they post that are photos and not videos not getting as many likes as they would have wanted.

But still, let's say that it's because they wanted to see pictures of their friends and family. Adam Mosseri basically said, look, that was just a test. We're pulling it back. We realize that that's not what people want. So they're going to try to revamp that as well.

But this is just further evidence that Facebook is no longer interesting to teens. I mean, I don't even use it anymore. We'll say I'm just over being a teen. And Instagram isn't doing as well either. I mean, it's still falling below TikTok.

So Meta-- this is a huge audience that they need. Their future buyers, advertisers want them. If Meta can't grab them, then that's a huge problem for them.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah. And it's interesting to see the breakdown there, because it points to the fact that not everybody wants short form video in every single app, right? Users are sort of differentiating between them. Dan Howley, as always, staying on top of the social media beat for us. Thanks so much for that.