What are the most popular social networks, apps, and websites for high schoolers? Niche asked. Seven thousand teenagers answered. Here are the results (click to enlarge).
I've sliced the data to get what I really wanted: One bar graph comparing daily users across platforms. Social networks and apps are in blue. Websites are in red. Facebook properties are in deep blue. (All caveats about media-use surveys apply.)
Four observations for the road:
1. Pandora? Pandora! I don't often see Pandora hailed as a Master of Attention quite like other apps that tech writers pay attention to. Maybe it's because Pandora is the background music—literally—to other activities and apps soaking up most of our attention. But the fact that more teens report using Pandora than Instagram, or Snapchat, or iTunes, or Netflix, is astonishing. The second graph, on daily use, shows Pandora slightly behind Insta and Snapchat, but still ahead of Twitter, phone calls, and iTunes.
You could try to shoo away my astonishment by saying something like "well, duh, teens love music" but that doesn't explain why Pandora's daily users are almost 4X Spotify, almost 5X Beats, and more than 6X Rdio—even though all those other services let you pick the songs you want to hear. Pandora is doing something very, very right, and it's still barely making money. Distributing music on the Internet, ladies and gentlemen: Great service, rough business.