Teens barely spend any time on Snapchat anymore
If you have a teen living in your home, you’re probably already tuned into the fact that their phones never ever stop buzzing. Now, a new report from Common Sense Media is revealing just how many average notifications teens are getting throughout the day, where they’re getting those “quick hits” from, and which apps they’re spending all that time staring down at.
The results are—ding, ding, ding—stress-inducing. On average, the study of 203 teens in the United States, aged 11 to 17, showed kids get at least 237 notifications a day. Around a quarter of those occur during the school day, but they really start popping off in the evening hours. And the alerts don’t stop during sleeping hours, with around 5% persisting into the night. Two thirds of teens said that staying on their phone affects their sleep—49% said it sometimes does, and 18% said they are staying awake often.
According to the study, some teens’ phones dinged with notifications upwards of 5,000 times a day. And for some, checking their phones is far more than just a distraction from school and other activities—it’s a lifestyle. Teens are fueled by “quick hits” of feel-good brain chemicals that arrive hundreds, if not thousands, of times daily.
Most notifications came from friends sending messages and memes on social media. The study, which had participants download and install a tracking app on their phones, also monitored the amount of time spent on various apps including Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Discord. But overall, two apps seemed to dominate where teens are spending their time: TikTok and YouTube.
On TikTok, kids can watch quick videos anytime—even between classes or during pauses in conversations—and more than 38% of their daily usage comes from the app. But they also spend tons of time watching content on YouTube, with just over 18% of their time being dominated by the video-streaming platform. Notably, kids are spending far less time on apps like Snapchat and Instagram, at just 3.6% and 5.9%, respectively. Instagram may have always been more popular with millennials (who were late to the TikTok game), but the Snapchat downturn has hit harder.
As Gen Z users have seemed to fall off from the app, the company has also attempted to target a new audience. In a memo that leaked last year, CEO Evan Spiegel announced plans to gear the app toward an older crowd, as well as growing audiences in Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Spain, and Japan. “This will require significant coordination and accountability across our communications, marketing, global brand experience, growth, product, and market development teams in addition to many other teams,” he wrote.
Reached by Fast Company, a Snapchat representative declined to comment, but cited data showing that Snapchat reached 397 million daily active users globally in the second quarter of this year, which was up 14% year-over-year, and that 90% of Gen Z users in the United States are already on Snapchat.
Still, no matter what apps kids are using, they are constantly online. And they don’t seem confused about the fact that they are never not engaging with content. According to the study, teens know their phones are making them stressed, and anti-social too: 58% say they sometimes or often avoid connection with friends in order to spend more time on their phones. Meanwhile, 39% of kids recognize that they sometimes use their phones to escape real life, and 30% often avoid their feelings by staring at their hand-held devices.
Avoiding reality with a quick dopamine hit is certainly not a new tactic—but we have to wonder what happens when that becomes the go-to tactic for anything and everything. Maybe, for teens, their iPhones are real life, and the rest is just background noise.
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