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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

The social media behemoth has seen a decline in traffic in recent weeks along with millions of users leaving its platform [...]

Two years ago I said that Facebook will be dead by 2020 [1] and that line made me check the current situation, we are right on track and linear extrapolation still hits zero in mid 2020 [2]. As mentioned in the original thread, don't get fooled by the normalized numbers, the search traffic for Facebook is enormous and chances are good that any search term you consider popular will be indistinguishable from the horizontal axis if you add it for comparison. But »facebook« is already down from ten to four times »porn«. And yes, the trend can and possibly is at least partly due to other factors, some are also discussed in the original thread.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11442935

[2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook

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Wishful thinking. Facebook may be struggling in 2020, but they certainly won’t be dead. I’d wager they’ll still have more than a billion DAU.

Edit: do you have an explanation for why this graph has been cratering for years while Facebook’s MAU and DAU have continued to climb?

Also, see Youtube’s search trend. Pretty sure it hasn’t been dying for years now.

This just isn’t a good signal, sorry.

My best guess is that the active user numbers are not representative. Once you have an Facebook account checking once a day if something interesting happened or sending a few messages makes you an active user, I guess, but in my book that does not mean you are really using Facebook.

I still visit Facebook almost every day, mostly to chat with friends, even though my feed has mostly become an uninteresting desert years ago and I rarely - less than once a month - post, comment or like something. So if I am not an exception, then looking at the number of users posting or commenting on any given day might vastly differ from the number of active users but I admittedly don't know how exactly Facebook defines those.

And if you look at the search traffic for MySpace, Google+, or the German StudiVZ and MeinVZ [1] it certainly tracked the rise and fall pretty exactly. Finally the YouTube search traffic is essentially flat for me since 2012 besides a step at the beginning of 2016 due to changed data collection methods.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/SGci58n.png

Ah, I see. So in this case, “dead” means billions of people who login multiple times per week and the accompanying tens of billions in ad revenue.

May we all have startups that suffer such a fate.

Seriously though, I’m not sure what your point even is. Facebook doesn’t care about how often you login or why, as long as ad revenue keeps flowing. And those numbers have grown like crazy over the period where you say their search traffic (and thus their userbase) has been cratering. I just don’t see it. Every meaningful metric for Facebook that you can find for the period in question points to the search trend not being a reliable predictor.

Also, my point with YouTube is that their search trend has been flat or declining since 2012, but YouTube as a platform has been anything but over that time period.

Not a useful signal.

Most people access Facebook through the app or directly to the website.

Google search traffic is not a good indicator of Facebook users or popularity.

That is not really a convincing argument, even if nobody used searching to get to Facebook, the search traffic would still reflect the general interest in Facebook. But given the huge search traffic it is not convincing that nobody uses search to access Facebook to begin with. So one has to at least argue that the decline in search traffic is due to user migrating from browser to app or something along that line. Also see the comments in the old thread.

Everybody uses power utilities, but what's the search volume for power companies?

Low but constant [1] and it is the constant volume that matters, not the volume on itself.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

Previously, the search traffic will have represented general interest plus people using it to get to the site. You'd expect a decrease as more and more people use the apps, or web browsers get better at autofilling the domain rather than it becoming a search, even if the level of general interest remains the same (anecdotally, circa 2011 most people I knew would use Facebook on a PC; now most use a mobile app).

There's probably a decline, especially given the myriad messaging apps that have come to prominence more recently, but not as sharp as the searches would suggest.

Are you sure about that?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook...

and

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=facebook...

Those graphs suggest that while the trajectory is bad on this graph, any other site doesn't come close.

Sure, the search traffic is huge but so is the rate it is falling at. If it stopped right now, it would still be a very huge site, but are there any indications that it does? Are there good alternative explanations for the decline in search traffic that would not indicate a decline in popularity of Facebook, for example can the decline be matched with users migrating from browser to app? I failed to find a satisfying alternative explanation.

Besides that, I noticed a decline of the popularity of Facebook among the people I know at least about 5 years ago. I only looked at the search traffic for confirmation years later when that trend was pretty obvious from personal experience because I was interested whether that was a general trend or only due to me and the people I know becoming older or something like that.

Add to that that I talked to some young teenagers last year that somewhat proudly told me that they don't have and never had Facebook profiles and for all I know Facebook really is on the way down. Whether everyone just moves over to Instagram and WhatsApp and what all that implies for the company Facebook is of course also a different matter.

Maybe in the U.S. I was in Asia few months ago and I came across people who were new to Facebook. Facebook still has a honeymoon period with those people who just discovered their 'new' platform. Given the massive population in Brazil and India that would be a sizable chunk of users.

But financially problematic for Facebook. They built an expensive cost base that relies on advertising for users with high nominal income. Advertisers pay far less for Indian and Brazilian users. That's why the decline in US users is so important, not because they lose traffic but because it's directly linked to revenues.

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