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Ebersman, CFO of the social media giant, can only sit back and wonder while Facebook’s subscribers list undergoes a major demographic shift.
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David Ebersman , CFO of Facebook should be a worried man, with recently released statistics showing the social media giant has seen more than four million of their younger subscribers no longer use Facebook, the way that they did two years ago.
However, Ebersman, echoing the sentiments of Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the top Facebook management team doesn’t appear to be too worried, especially when considering that the website has close to 1.2 billion active users, and growth of its mobile advertising business made for a 60 percent increase in revenue in the last quarter from $2.02 billion from $1.26 billion a year ago.
In the third-quarter of 2013, net income for the company rose to $425 million compared to a loss of $59 million in the same quarter last year.
These figures pour a lot of cold water among the nonbelievers in the Facebook’s business model, who for some time now have contended that the social network is losing its luster, using the fact that they’re losing their teen audience that the company is overvalued.
The current picture of Facebook’s situation as far as subscriber demographics is concerned had a lot of light thrown upon it thanks to a report from one of the United States leading digital consultants.
Their study, totally drawn from Facebook’s Social Advertising platform, showed that the social media web site attracts just over 4 million fewer high school aged users that did in 2011, and even more worrying maybe the fact that close to 7 million subscribers of college age had disappeared from the platform.
On the upside, during the same two-year period, Facebook subscribers from every other age spectrum rose, and, in some cases, quite spectacularly.
The survey showed that the number of users in the important 25 to 34 age bracket rose by close to a third, while those in the 35 to 54 age group jumped up by just over 40 percent, the highest percentage rise among Facebook users being in the 55 or older age group which jumped up by more than 80% whooping 80.4 percent.
According to the figure generated currently the largest age group who regularly log on to Facebook now are sitting firmly the 35 to 54 age group, comprising 31 percent of all Facebook users, followed up by those in the 25 to 34 with 24.4 percent.
What may be most interesting to Facebook followers is that they once highly dominant 18 to 24 age bracket now only makes up 23.3 percent of Facebook users in the United States, while those aged 55 plus have risen to 15.6 percent. The younger Facebook subscribers, aged between 13 to 17, have amazingly become the minority, making up just 5.4 percent of the total demographics.
Advertisers, who at one time may hung back from Facebook because they feared the lack of buying power of their younger subscribers are now rushing to advertise on the site, whose see this shift in demographics towards a more adult audience with increased spending power.
What David Ebersman and the Facebook team may be pointing to is the fact that while Facebook may not be such a cool place to be these days if you’re under the age of 20, advertising through the social media site can guarantee a lot more significant market penetration.
David Ebersman is the holder of an A.B. in Economics and International Relations, which he gained from Brown University.
Ebersman has a long career in financial management, beginning where he served as a Research Analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., the New York-based investment bank, leaving them in 1994 to join biotechnology giants, Genentech where he was to remain for 13 years, holding down a number of top management positions before joining Facebook in April 2009.
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