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Study: Ages of social network users

February 16th, 2010 General

Social network ages

How ancient is the average Chirrup or Facebook user? What in this area all the additional social arrangement sites out there, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on? How is age distributed across the millions and millions of social arrangement users out there?

To find out, we pulled together age data for 19 different social arrangement sites, and crunched the numbers.

Full list of sites in this study: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Chirrup, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Tasty, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Last.fm, Friendster, LiveJournal, Hi5, Tagged, Ning, Xanga, Classmates.com, Bebo.

To get regular age data for the various sites we used site demographics in rank for the United States gathered from Google’s Ad Conspirator service and then did some additional calculations to get all the data we needed.

Social arrangement age distribution

What is the age distribution in the social media sphere?

We took the age distribution data we had collected and calculated what the age distribution looked like across all 19 sites counted together. The resulting chart is right here not more than.

Average social network age distribution

A full 25% of the users on these sites are aged 35 to 44, which in additional words is the age group that dominates the social media sphere. Only 3% are aged 65 or older.

That was the age distribution when looking at these 19 sites together. When looking at individual social arrangement sites, the differences are significant, as you will see not more than.

Age distribution per site

Here not more than you can examine the age distribution for each of the 19 social arrangement sites we included in this study. The list has been sorted by the average user age per site (see further down for that), with the “youngest” site showing at the top and the “oldest” at the bottom.

Age distribution on social network sites

Some observations on age distribution:

Bebo appeals to a much younger audience than the additional sites with 44% of its users being aged 17 or less. For MySpace, this number is also large; 33%.
Classmates.com has the largest share of users being aged 65 or more, 8%, and 78% are 35 or older.
64% of Chirrup’s users are aged 35 or older.
61% of Facebooks’s users are aged 35 or older.

Dominant age groups

Most of the social networks we included are dominated by the age group 35-44, which was apparent in the initially chart in this article. This group has become the most “social” age group out there. This is the generation of public who were in their 20s as the Web took off in the mid ‘90s.

If we look at which age groups are the largest for each site, we get the following distribution:

0 – 17: Tops 4 out of 19 sites (21%)
18 – 24: Tops no site
25 – 34: Tops 1 out of 19 sites (5%)
35 – 44: Tops 11 out of 19 sites (58%)
45 – 54: Tops 3 out of 19 sites (16%)
55 – 64: Tops no site
65 or older: Tops no site

It’s a bit surprising that not one single site had the age group 18 – 24 as its largest, but that can be clarified by this interval being a bit smaller than the additional ones (it spans seven years, not 10 as most of the others). That the two oldest age groups don’t top any of the sites probably doesn’t surprise anyone, though.

Average user age per site

As we promised in the initiation, we have calculated an estimate of the average age for each of the social arrangement sites included in this study. The result is here not more than.

Estimated average age on social network sites

A few observations:

The average social arrangement user is 37 years ancient.
LinkedIn, with its business focus, has a predictably high average user age; 44.
The average Chirrup user is 39 years ancient.
The average Facebook user is 38 years ancient.
The average MySpace user is 31 years ancient.
Bebo has by far the youngest users, as witnessed earlier, with an average age of 28.

On the social web, age is a factor

Although we can’t say how this will change over time, at the moment the older generations are for one reason or another (tech savvy, interest, etc.) not using social networking sites to a large extent. This probably reflects general internet usage, but we suspect the difference is enhanced when it comes to the social media sphere where site usage tends to be more frequent and time-consuming than usual.

It is also noteworthy that social media isn’t dominated by the youngest, often most tech-savvy generations, but rather by what has to be referred to as middle-aged public (although at the younger end of that spectrum).

Suggested further reading: Males vs. females on social arrangement sites