Facebook monthly visits down 5% in April
nwn.blogs.com
nwn.blogs.com
Source for my intuition: I worked on something very close three years ago (at Facebook). Privacy scandals barely ever register at any company I worked; seemingly minor tweaks to the News Feed could have that compound impact.
Society has changed.
Now I can't fathom how I accepted to carry that crap around with me, and sometimes forget that just because I don't use it, social media hasn't vanished from the world. I feel as if I was living in a post-social media era, because in my subconscious, social media is dead.
But when people start using the service less that's significant especially at these higher traffic sites.
I subscribed to the NY Times and Washington Post. I re-bookmarked sites like Anandtech and Ars for periodic visits. I changed how I use services like Google at the same time. It's a whole other issue, but just the long contemplation about this had me switch from my GS8 to what was my development iPhone 8 as my daily driver.
I know I'm just one person, but quite a few people have made similar proclamations, and among peers I know several just finally abandoned the site (the whole fake news things already starting the flow). These sorts of periodic issues just blend away when a site is on a dramatic growth curve and it just gets drowned out, but Facebook had essentially peaked, so they're really in a position to only lose users.
I'm keeping messenger for now, only because my GF is in another state, and it's the most consistent way to video chat (which is a shame).
Good thing that FB georestricted the app from Play Store, leaving dodgy operators to fill its space and deliver spyware bombs instead. /s
Getting her to add it and see that a few people on her contact list were already on there, including her boss, and that you can audio/video chat was a big push. Still working on that, though.
Might be worth a shot:
Also one person not representative of the population, arguably, as you're commenting on HN which may make you more aware of the recent news on Facebook and potentially more security-conscious.
Further anecdata - several non-nerds in my life have decided to use facebook less, and several have also started using Signal instead of WhatsApp.
I’d say it’s a small but significant number of people, I don’t expect it to hurt Facebook much unless it becomes a trend - if cultural trendsetters if different groups do the same, it could do some serious damage. (See also: Elon).
But it's only when there are negative consequences for people individually beyond collectives like Cambridge Analytica that people will dramatically change their usage patterns. Self preservation is one of the strongest human instincts.
Already parents are much more careful of their children's usage. Things can change suddenly and before you know it the tech stereotype of 'indifferent users' will be over and the conversation will shift to 'entitled users'.
Sadly, owning a business it’s pretty much required to deal with Facebook. Unless I want to spend five times as much on traditional advertising for less than half of the results.
My intuition is that the effectiveness of algorithmic advertising is largely over-stated. I'd really like to see a controlled test of FB ad ROI vs traditional ad ROI.
However, paying to “boost a post” on Facebook is much better. So much so that I’ve dropped nearly all other advertising. Running an ad can only target so well, as it’s mostly based on plain old demographics. But boosted posts also take into account those who have liked your business page, responded to your prior posts, and who their friends are. At least, that’s the impression my results have been given me.
While hard numbers and analysis would be nice to see of course, I have little interest in seeing hard numbers in this case. My proof is that I was able to slash my ad budget by over half, and yet still more than double my business. Over a year later with mostly just Facebook, business is still growing.
I’m sure the nature of my business is rather well suited to Facebook though. I’m a sole proprietor offering group entertainment services on a local scale. Im sure the ch companies and other less localized businesses may not get as good results.
I am sure some still get amazing results, especially through retargetting on a good budget. However small targeted campaigns don't have the same effect anymore as they had before in my and some friends experiences.
I'll put 5 SCL, or 10 schrute-bucks, on the whole purpose of this site being to build up market interest so they can sell it to Facebook.
Edit: had to go for a smoke half way through that site, mustered up the strength to finish reading. Their roadmap for the number of employees they have is beyond laughable. I'm not entirely convinced this isn't satire
Aside from this, in my home country, the Philippines, SMS & telephone services are expensive. Being a 3rd world archipelago country, infrastructure in the provinces is so bad that cabled & optic internet is not available for a lot of people. Facebook is a gem in my country in that they provide free internet for anyone utilising FB's services with a smartphone (you can buy cheap 2nd hand android phones there for less than $20). The folks here use FB's services to keep themselves updated with the world as well as to call/chat. It's a great way to connect and recently people don't even memorise their phone numbers anymore and instead, people ask each other for their facebook.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...
- How was length of visit effected?
- What demographic(s)?
- One month is not a trend!! Not even two is a trend. You need at least 3 to see a trend.
- If the drop was from the previous month, was that month (a typically) up for some reason (e.g., another MSM driven political "controversy")
This kind of date / statistics / "analysis" abuse really bother me.
- is there a seasonality trend? Maybe FB’s trafffic goes down every april (weather warmer perhaps?)
- how did the total traffic to all websites change since March? how about to Twitter or Pinterest? We need a benchmark!
I don’t need a social network. E-mail and IM actually work fine; it’s trivial to include a link to web content in an e-mail which covers almost everything else.
LinkedIn is great for work; because it’s explicitly a curated experience focused on employment. But past that I neither need nor want a social network. I think this realization will be the most damning for Facebook.
Isn’t it still going to be full of the same garbage?
Isn’t this like quitting cigarettes then getting vaped?
Also, how could you really pull out data? If you put data out there and I make a copy of it and decide to keep it for all time how are you going to pull it back?
But sure, once you've given someone access to information, you can't make them forget it. Except through legislation (cough...GDPR...). You could revoke their access rights and they could no longer receive updates regarding your social graph.
IMO we are already there and people just don't realize the chance we actually get into.
My circle communicates through: Telegram, Hangout, Whatsapp, Steam, Messenger, SMS/Calls, some Discord, a few also Slack. And pretty sure also other things I forget.
What I see here is a decentralised, privacy first (due to closed channels) way to socialize without building a central social graph, or a single point of failure/propaganda.
I always had a feeling that the various quizzes and games were harvesting information. I thought that if I ignored them, they would not get mine. The CA incident proved that wrong. That's what pushed me over the edge. The shifting sands of FB personal information security just got to be too much for me.
I miss the camaraderie and the communities (and communication) but I'm not certain it is worth the price. At the very least, I want to send a message to FB. And they did notice in an algorithmic manner. They really cranked up the email notifications of all of the things I was missing. If enough people do that their numbers will drop and that will have a material effect on their stock price. That will get their attention and perhaps result in a reevaluation of their behavior.
I'm not the only one with this opinion: https://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-com...
But there are also 3% less days in April, so that's a lot less significant than it seems.
Depends on how they are studying. If on the computer, then more Facebook. If on textbook, then less.
Anyone know if it has any statistical significance? I have my doubts just from the presentation.
If you zoom out you can see that Facebook's web traffic has been on the downtrend for awhile https://i.imgur.com/e9Mgjby.png. Also April has one less day than March which wasn't mentioned.
FB has 1.4B Daily Active Users. 1.4B * 30 days = 42B visits/month. That's a lower bound because many Facebook DAUs visit more than once per day.
So the baseline number that this blog cites (~22B visits/month) is almost certainly incorrect.
-5% from that baseline might be significant, or it could be sampling bias.
Realistically, I'd expect the average user to open Facebook maybe thrice a day, or more. Which means this is roughly ~1% of their monthly traffic.
The verdict: nobody gives a shit about their privacy enough to change their habits.
Facebook earned $6.18 per user in Q4 of 2017 [1]. That's about $25 per yyear. 1.3bn users thus represent about $32.5 billion of revenues.
U.S. and Canadian ARPI was $27.76 for the same period [1]. Let's say 880% of those #DeletingFacebook were from those, or similarly-lucrative, rregions. Blended lost ARPU thus estimates to $23.44 per quarter. Across 1.3bn users, that's $128 billion.
Far from a drop in the bucket.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
You'd have to figure out the value per visit to reach a conclusion along the lines you're attempting to make.
Fair enough. One can roughly adjust those figure by dividing by the number of times the average Facebook user visits Facebook each month. This is nothing existential. But it's still, likely, over a billion dollars of lost revenue.
I doubt Facebook earns anywhere near $1 per visit.
> Assuming the average Facebook user visits the social network once a day, that would suggest an average of about 43 million less users during that month. In recent months, Facebook makes about $5 per user, per month -- i.e. some $215 million in potential lost revenue.