According to a 2018 marketing presentation, Instagram lamented the loss of teenage users that drifted to other social media platforms as an "existential threat," an article in The New York Times (NYT) revealed.

Despite the platform surpassing the 1 billion users threshold in 2018, internal Instagram documents obtained by the NYT included a company strategy memo from October 2020 saying that if "we lose the teen foothold in the US, we lose the pipeline.” 

To combat this decline, Instagram launched a $390 million campaign this year to target teenagers, mainly through digital ads. Focusing solely on a specific demographic, namely teens between 13-15, this highly specific targeting is unusual. The aforementioned Instagram documents also mentioned the company's "angst" and "dread" as it wrestles against other more successful platforms.

Facebook has an aging user base

Facebook, the mother company of Instagram, hoped that the latter would "entice more young people to all of its apps, replenishing Facebook’s aging user base," according to documents cited by The NYT. Facebook faces troubles following what whistleblower Frances Haugen had revealed in Congress, as she announced that Facebook did not respect its standard regarding younger users.

According to three former Instagram employees, the company began focusing on the "teen time spent" statistics data. Two other employees said that when the coronavirus pandemic occurred last year, forcing individuals to stay at home for safety, "teen time spent" in the US jumped to an average of three to four hours each day, up from one to two hours earlier. The average adult spent 30 to 45 minutes per day on the site.

Teenage usage data started deteriorating

While a September 2020 marketing planning document for Instagram revealed the service had grown its number of daily users by roughly 24% over the year, some data on teenagers had begun to deteriorate. According to the document, Snapchat was the favored app for best friends who wanted to communicate with each other, while TikTok was competing with YouTube for youngsters who wanted to share videos.

Instagram is still on top

Data from the Companies show that Instagram remains the most popular of these networks, with over 1.3 billion users, followed by TikTok with one billion users and Snapchat with 500 million. However earlier this year, according to a survey conducted by financial services firm Piper Sandler, 35% of youngsters claimed Snapchat was their favorite social media network, with 30% selecting TikTok.  Instagram came in third with a mere 22%.