Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

As Twitter Grows Up, Its Users Don’t

Facebook has a teen problem. Or maybe not. Depends on whom you ask.

How about Twitter?

No problem at all, says a Wall Street analyst. Kids love themselves some Twitter.

If you have been on Twitter for a very long time, this may surprise you, since, in the old days, Twitter was for old people, which made its early years different from most social networks’.

But, whatever. Now Twitter is enjoying a youth movement. Here’s data to support the notion, from comScore, served up via J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth, whose bank was one of the underwriters in the Twitter IPO:*

Twitter’s U.S.-based Web audience skews young — more so than the rest of the Web. (Twitter is represented by the blue bars; Facebook is in gray and LinkedIn is black. Sort of surprising to see that LinkedIn’s under-18 numbers exist at all, right?)

Twitter Comscore US Age Desktop.14 AM copy

The same holds for Twitter’s global Web audience:

Twitter Comscore WW Desktop Age

And that’s definitely the case when you combine Twitter + young folks with phones:

Twitter Comscore US Mobile Age

If you are a Twitter employee, and/or an investor who wants to see the stock rise, those charts may make you sleep more soundly. Because they could help you answer the “can Twitter ever really get mainstream?” question — if kids are coming to it now, that has to be a good thing, right?

But, for what it’s worth, note that even though Anmuth is a believer in the Twitter story,** he’s lukewarm on Twitter stock. He has put a “neutral” rating on the stock, with a $40 price target.

Twitter’s price as of last night: $41.57.

* You’ll see a bunch of research out today from banks that brought Twitter to market. Yesterday marked the end of a 25-day quiet period for analysts who work at Twitter underwriters.

** Which is fortunate, because see above.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Iakov Filimonov)

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google