Why Facebook is Losing US Users
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
Given the near total saturation in the US, it's not surprising that their monthly actives are starting to show some decay from the quality of installs going down as they grow as well as some seasonal affect.
Basically, the replacement rate of new installs in the US is lower than the number of people who have not been active in the past 30 days. If we had more granular data, I'd be willing to bet the loss is primarily in users who installed recently, not longer-tenure users losing interest or switching services. Like my mom.
there is a certain amount of short-term churn: people who signup and then leave again. if that rate hasn't changed we can ignore them, since the number leaving this month is made up by the number arriving now who will leave next month. it comes out in the wash.
then there's the slower loss of long term users, which needs to be balanced by keeping a few new signups.
so far, the above is more-or-less consistent with what you say. but then you end with a comment that somehow mixes the two, trying to explain a mismatch in the second process with people who "even out" in the first.
it would be better to say that one or both of the following (which describe decline in terms of the two processes outlined above) is happening:
A - the amount of churn is falling off. so the people present for only this month are less than the people who were only there last month.
B - long term uses that drift away aren't being replaced by new users.
because (B) eats into the entire user base, while (A) is relative to the new users per month, only (B) can explain a sustained decline (the first process can't explain a loss of more people than sign up per month).
so we can simply wait and see. if the decline is prolonged then it must be long-term users that are leaving and not being replaced.
most heavy users of fb that i know are people that signed up a long time ago. it was an important part of their social life and most still use the site.
but recently, i've had a few more (older, less tech-savvy) friends on fb. they 'got around' to joining fb eventually. but because it wasn't as important to their social life to join, and they only bothered doing so after knowing about fb for a few years, they are more likely to drift away.
i don't know if that's true, but it doesn't sound too unreasonable.
Saturation and Fatigue You can only see so many drunken weekend pics before it gets old.
Everyone's On It Friending your Mom, boss, etc. really makes it suck.
Social Games Pretty much raped the platform. I'm guilty of spamming friends for poker chips.
Too Many Links News feed is flooded with regurgitated links that are supposed to be interesting.
Event Spam If the inbox was a real email inbox, some of those invitations would surely violate some spam law.
It's Everywhere It's hard to find a website that doesn't have like buttons or commenting or widgets (many have them all). It gets to be a bit much.
Maybe FB used to be clean and useable, especially compared to MySpace, but is it really still the case? Am I just an idiot?
Also, in what ways has Facebook been technologically innovative? The other thing I hear about FB is that their engineering team is amazing and fast. Again, as a non-user, I really don't know what the feature set is like. I feel like I don't really hear about genuinely interesting features that much, but people always talk about the engineering with reverence. Can someone enlighten me?
regarding the technology, some of the amazing things that happen unfortunately can't always be seen via a browser. for example, the fact that they're able to store (and retrieve) millions of photos a day is quite an engineering feat. the number of user posts per hour must also be quite astonishing and probably a multiple higher than photos. the scale with which fb is able to launch datacenters and manage thousands upon thousands of servers also makes for quality engineering.
Technology-wise the nature of the problem is the impressive thing. They have hundreds of millions of users visiting the site daily, each one seeing a completely customized page view on every load. There's no low-hanging fruit caching wise. What Google does for search or Amazon does for product pages is of negligible benefit. They were essentially the first company to tackle this type of problem successfully. Remember, Friendster failed because of this. MySpace pages loaded at half the speed despite doing only 10% as much. Facebook innovated at every level of the service. Just look at BigPipe (http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-p...) as an example of how they optimize the page loading experience itself for minimal perceived latency (then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels).
Considering the scale of the problem, you're right--it's impressively responsive. But I'd still hesitate to call it fast--on almost every visit, I'll have pictures that won't load, "like" tooltips that perpetually display "Loading..." instead of "John Doe liked this", newsfeed loading problems, etcetera. It could definitely be much faster.
If there would actually be a competitive and disruptive service to switch to (besides Twitter), Facebook's early adopters would quit it even faster than they are now. But for now we're just seeing those getting bored with it quit.
Looking forward to see if Diaspora, Altly and Incliq will be those "disruptive" services to compete with it (though I'm not sure if either of them will be disruptive or just incremental). Or perhaps something new will appear soon.
If I were rich I'd set up a YC-equivalent in which I'd sling $30K at anyone who claims to be building the "next facebook". Think you can do it? Think you've got a new approach to the problem? Great, here's $30K, I'll take six percent, see you when you get your first hundred thousand users! One of 'em has to pay off eventually.
Would you have bet on Apple if you were trying to find the next Microsoft? (Would you even consider Apple the next Microsoft?)
What about Google? I don't think there is a "next Google".
Will there be success after Facebook? Of course, but I don't think it will look like Facebook. So I don't think looking for "the next Facebook" is the right course of action.
So it may be worth asking: is Facebook more like Google, or more like Apple? Or in other words: would Facebook survive a demotion from "cool, trendy place to be" to "utility?" Is such a "demotion" happening as we speak?
Facebook is not going to be supplanted by Twitter or iCloud, neither of these serve remotely the same purpose.
...and neither will HTML pages supplant desktop applications or brick-and-mortar stores, right? Because neither of these serve remotely the same purpose?
That's exactly the way things often go in technology and business. New wins over incumbents not by attacking them head-on on their home turf, but by creating a new niche with some interesting, unforeseen properties.
At some point commerce realizes world + dog uses it and start providing goods and services -- and the new is thence understood to have supplanted the incumbent.
Facebook is pretty much the landline phone of late XX century. The market's ripe for something like the cellphone to disrupt it.
The only instance where I thought that Facebook was useful was for getting together for a 10 year high-school reunion, but even then, only half of my old colleagues were on Facebook. What worked was plain word-of-mouth, since somebody always knows someone that is missing from the conversation and can get in contact.
Basically what has the potential to kill Facebook are the old means of communication, channels that are still reliable and still widespread. That's why Facebook does provide IM and even email, as they want to move your Inbox on their servers; but IMHO, that remains to be seen how well it plays out, as people are pretty conservative about their current email and IM accounts (it's like your phone number, you don't want to change it so often).
And I can see why they are afraid of Google - Google has users that rely heavily on their email service, which is state of the art IMHO, it has user profiles that will appear in search results, it has productivity apps that allow for collaboration, it works on social search features as an alternative to Facebook's Like, and if Buzz wouldn't suck so much, they would have been a serious threat by now.
Unfortunately for Google, they can't seem to pull their shit together. Also, judging in this light, Microsoft's acquisition of Skype may not have been so stupid after all.
1. a user could register for as many fb accounts as he/she has emails. i personally have 2 facebook accounts, the reason is because i forgot that i registered an account, not necessarily because of my alter ego, he's quite passive and doesn't like fb.
2. users that pass away
3. users that move beyond a certain age range
4. pages that don't represent individuals, like brands or groups, those could dissolve.
i don't think this data really says much of anything about the facebook phenomenon other than the fact that there are some adjustments in the total number of accounts, perhaps for the better as the dirty are purged into oblivion.
a more interesting statistic would be how much freaking revenue they're making.
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/05/facebook-deleting-second-li...
"the most recent hullabaloo over the site's new facial-recognition abilities is small potatoes compared to controversies of the past"
was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Had an account from before most people had even heard of Facebook, but deleted mine the other day.
The big deal is from the users who are upset and want to make their opinions known. I don't think anyone seriously expects a mass defection. What might happen is a slow erosion of the site's usefulness due to subtle changes in behavior. Eg people start sanitizing their status updates, making them less interesting and removing incentive for people to log in. Another example might be if they are annoyed clunky and restrictive photo sharing tools they start sharing their pictures somewhere else.
What is notable that when I broadcast my quit on FB, only a few % of my 'friends' cared to inquire regarding keeping up contacts. So I felt really good about quitting: it let me know who cared to keep in contact for real, and who was linked to me via social obligation.
I miss the content that some people only provide via the FB walled garden (the notes-posts, not the Wall feed).
I'm not so sure of that. The biggest complaint that I've seen about Facebook is burnout. In light of that, increased views/user is a sign that they are encouraging people to do things that will lead to more burnout in the future.
Could be: Summer has come, kids are now hanging out physically more than virtually which is what happens when you have homework/school (hs -> college)
I've seen plenty of seasonal cycles like this in various websites I've managed in the past. It's not exactly a new thing.
Also FB and Twitter got a lot of press for touting HUGE user numbers, but now that they are at hundreds of millions of users, they are obviously killing spam accounts more aggressively. I wouldn't be surprised if as much as 25% of the users on Facebook or Twitter are spam accounts or bots. At its peak MySpace was certainly up there in that range.
http://www.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/view...
I can't say this sort of thing caused 6 million others to delete as well, but as someone who has had a Facebook account since 2004 this was the thing to finally push me over the edge.
I should add that I don't miss it at all.