Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers (2014)

theguardian.com

17 pointsxyby9 comments

Should add a "(2014)" to the title. This is a year old and already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904

EDIT: And Facebook issued a reply here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-develin/debunking-prince...

Does facebook need users?

Considering shadow profiles, and the wide base of installation on websites all over the world, they can continue with big data generation without anyone ever reaching out to them.

Instagram continues to grow, along with Whatsapp. The facebook (shadow profile) data and the real user profiles of those apps will be correlated and ads will be targeted to users on those platforms.

They will lose revenue from the owners of facebook "pages", but I'd be willing to bet that they will expand their API to to serve facebook ads on web sites, if they feel the need to bandage that platform when they have some more desirable platforms already underway.

This idea is old. A few years ago someone claimed "Facebook is not cool anymore, now your parents are on it" and predicted an exodus of teenagers leaving. Didn't happen. Facebook is useful because it's full of people. It thrives on popularity. It's not run on being cool. Unless they make a Digg move and really screw up, people aren't going to drop it.

I question a lot of this. Everyone I know uses it less and less. Teenagers do, at least to me and everyone I know, seem to be using it less and less or foregoing it all together. In terms of ROI on ad spend, it seems to be decreasing for every client I work with. At the same time, clients are spending more and more. ROI down, revenue up. It's a rather bizarre scenario.

I'm starting to wonder if Facebook is cooking the books a little bit. Perhaps an outlandish statement since I can't substantiate it beyond personal experience, but that is how it feels.

Teenagers absolutely expect each other to have a Facebook account, and many use Messenger. They're not doing as many News Feed posts as older users though.

> John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term.

Yeah, that's not really a reliable metric if people have Facebook apps on their smartphones and set their homepage to Facebook now is it?

It was discussed later on in the article, but I do agree - the article is pretty bad; not much information on the study. I was expecting a detailed explanation of the methods ("equations") used, yet there wasn't much to back the title up. Feels like it was written just because some quota had to be met.

Search query data is not a reliable proxy for a platform people know as well as or better than Google.

orly? Based purely on the number of searches made for Facebook?

This is a terrible, baseless prediction that should not be published by the guardian or linked to Hacker News.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com