Facebook Fatigue? Visitors Level Off In the U.S.

all fads fade, now is the perfect time to go pitch that new social network you have in mind

It had to happen at some point.

I suspect the facebook / myspace / fill-in-the-social-nework-blank chart will be pretty close to the AOL chart as time goes on.

“I suspect the facebook / myspace / fill-in-the-social-nework-blank chart will be pretty close to the AOL chart as time goes on.”

I concur. Social networking is becoming decentralized now more than ever before and the niche sites aren’t worth a whole lot.

I think that the whole thing with the facebook fund, the advertising platform, ect… didn’t really help. It was like, oh, here’s x, y, z

…. oh, but not really.

oh, but maybe

…. but not really.

I think a lot of people left because they didn’t follow through on a lot of what they said.

I dunno, that chart is a bit misleading…the summer break traffic decline is normal and the dip last month also seems to coincide with the winter break. I know FB has expanded well beyond colleges I’d still bet that the majority of its active daily traffic are from high school and college students.

-Wayne

If they have to increase revenue without increasing visitors the user experience is all downhill from here.

Facebook is now allowing users to completely delete their profiles if need be. A few will drop off because of this, but it should alleviate some fears that Facebook will somehow use your info against your wishes to make money with it:
http://www.statesman.com/busin.....ebook.html

A good move.

How do Hi5 and Orkut compare? I’d be curious how much of this is the adoption curve in the US/Western Europe vs. worldwide.

Social networking will not die.
For many it serves a purpose - keeping in contact with friends or a group of interests. However, many are out there just to spend time, with no real or useful purpose and they will be the ones who will be or already are getting bored with it.
My guess is that they are causing this decline.

Zuck: sell it now, man!

Everyone i know is hardly writing on walls, poking, looking up old friends anymore.

That whole app spam thing pissed off alot of users, when you chat to people about facebook they normally start with ‘Those fucking stupid applications keep emailing me all day…’

Texas hold em poker is the worst, the makers of that must have a side line in viagra spam because there so fucking good at it.

Could be some bad blood from the Beacon Fiasco.

I know I basically stopped using FB after that.

I’m sick of facebook, I used to use it a lot more. It’s just a time-sink and is less useful to me then it was.

The clock is ticking for a monetization model. Otherwise FB will just become the flavor of the month.

My favorite posts on TC are the excuses (i.e. winter breaks)…… I would argue that kids would spend more time because they are not attending classes and have more time to fart around.

My nephew who uses MySpace was spending more hours on the website during Christmas vacation than during a regular week.

I hate to agree with Ballmer. But, yes this is a fad. Of course he got suckered into dumping $240M at a silly valuation. Bless his heart!

Hmm , I think at the very least, this (might) show that the breakneck pace of growth is over for FB. Which means they will need to make inroads ….

BTW - MikeT is right:
“Social networking will not die.
For many it serves a purpose - keeping in contact with friends or a group of interests. However, many are out there just to spend time, with no real or useful purpose and they will be the ones who will be or already are getting bored with it.”

Indeed, the casual users are about done at this point. Also, there’s the economy to consider. Would you spend time on FB and others, making money for someone else, or would you be better off starting your own network on Ning, or your own blog, and start building something that’s all yours???

With OpenSocial on Ning, you don’t even have to sacrifice usability, or the 3 FB apps that you actually like. As opposed to deleting 5000 Zombie notices every day.

I think niche social networks are going to become more popular. I for one don’t like having ex’s from 3-4 years ago seeing all my latest activities, which is the case with facebook. I cannot limit what they can see because then I look like a jerk.

I posted to Ingram’s blog that almost everyone I know who has teenage kids has a myspace and facebook account just to monitor their kids usage on the sites. They’re hardly ideal “customers.” And, outside silicon valley and technology companies, a lot of people I know can’t/don’t use social networking sites at work, so more just a way to keep in touch with friends.

Anecdotally, it seems the audience may be skewing increasingly female. I’d love to see if that’s universally true.

Traffic slowdown + Massive IT spending in 2008 + Underperforming Revenue = really BAD 2009! These guys will crash in 2009! Heard it here first!

I have tried to understand the appeal of these SN sites and I still don’t get it. Gee I can put up a page with pictures of me and all my (insert SN site name) “friends.” I keep reading about VCs throwing millions at .coms that boast the latest ways to connect with your (insert SN site name) “friends.”

This whole SN craze reminds me of the the first bubble. Of course I thought (prayed) reality TV was a fad that would die out. I suspect that people will tire of SN sites at some point.

Totally agree with Jim. I take a contrarian view on Facebook and do not believe in their long term viability.

“It’s just a time-sink and is less useful to me then it was.”

This maybe the dumbest sentence every written.

facebook hype is over, the beacon did not deliver, ads do not work. spammy apps killed whole taste of facebook, now 75% of my newsfeed is app spam.

Look at Jan 2007 in the graphs. Same exact trend as we are seeing in Jan 2008, followed by growth in Feb/March 2007.

The zenith of the hype was Microsoft’s $240 million investment for 1.6% stakes in Facebook. People flocked to the site to see what the big deal was about and got nothing but spam.

Microsoft launched a hostile takeover of Yahoo, so people took a second (or third, or fourth) look at Yahoo, and concluded that Yahoo is still a big old turkey.

The subtext of this story is probably about Microsoft’s “vision”.

I have added everyone I could possibly add. 900 people from all my past action…. We got all caught up… Now what?

Whether the stats tell an accurrate picture or not, Facebook Fatigue and Myspace Malaise are widespread infections. With Myspace I connected with friends I had not seen since my punk rock days which was a great and wonderful thing. Facebook well…. I was in a new relationship when I got on there and when it ended all my friends knew before I told them because my status changed, that added whammy to the bummer. Now I have over 700 notifications to delete, mostly from chicks in the UK, lol. This would be good time for stupid ass Tribe to get their shit together but from what I hear that’s as likely as no one catching an STD at Burning Man.

Nice to see there was no attempt to spin the numbers around in Facebook’s favor.

Clicking through the link I half expected to see a litany of excuses explaining how Facebook was really growing fast as heck and really was worth 15 billion dollars (the kids were on christmas break, so these stats don’t count)

But, no! The Facecruch team just presented the numbers. I didn’t walk away from the post wondering where you keep your signed Zuckerberg photo (seriously, is it on the nightstand?)

Will wonders never cease?

Or are you guys bailing on Facebook?

If that’s the case, the question is- who will you endlessly fawn over next?

I don’t think its fatigue, just that its growth is levelling off. Plus some people joined up just to see what its about, then left as they don’t normally use the internet much. From my experience, 95% of my friends have joined up to it in the last 6 months, and 80% continue to be regular users.

I find sites like TC to be about dumbing down the way people think because you don’t add any insight you just regurgitate the obvious.

The question is “why do we have social networks.” SN’s are a stepping stone to the future of the web one in which we move from search to discovery. In the real world we have friends who know more about cars, music, kids entertainers etc. and we tap them for knowledge discovery rather than search blindly for information.

SN’s are about the same thing. We are in the high school phase of SN where we have just joined and want to be friends with everyone but as we mature and progress we find our true friends and and niche social network in school.

Give it a few years and we will unlink for the 500+ “friends” we have and get stronger links to real people we want to connect with. FB/Myspace/Bebo etc are fads and will be replaced it might take a few years yet but it wil happen.

It must be a slow news day for the big boys when a normal cycle of user traffic makes it to the main page

(http://www.winextra.com/2008/02/22/social-network-shrinkage-blame-mother-nature/)

yea, FB reeks of something that could easily be seen as a novelty with diminishing returns. that microsoft cap certainly looks lofty now and i wonder if marc will be looked back with remorse for turning down y!

Hands up those of you who remember the crawling slinky? How about the firmer water-bed? What about the hula hoop - sold over 60 million in 1958. Poodle Skirts? Sock Hops? 3-D Movies? The Conical Bra (I know Madonna does), Beatniks? Pet rock? The Macarena? Flared Pants? Hot Pants? Leg Warmers? Yep - all fads, every last one of them.

Andy: don’t compare communication with just things.
SNs are a fad - yes, but they are also a new form of communication, which is here for hundreds of thousands of years. They may evolve, but they are here to stay.

Finally the fall begins for an overly hyped social network.

I wager everyone calling Facebook a fad is over 40. (and most likely has no social life)

The value was Myspace for 1/2 billion $. Myspace has made itself indispensable to the music industry - facebook struggles to find relevance beyond the photo app., social networking component. they need to profitably service a market - one that’s theirs to loose is college students.

They were/are? indispensable to college students (staggering numbers here) but instead of locking in that vertical with expanded services they went horizontal for more eyeballs - was this the right strategy? How does this effect their ability to monetize? What is a commonality or common interest amongst Facebook users today? … Pirates (arghh)

I agree with Discover, SN’s are about discovering information in a more efficient and trusting way. Finding opinions on anything from someone you trust works much better than randomly searching websites. I myself am currently working on an informational website for college students that purely aims at sharing knowledge of college lifestyle rather than just being social. I find it much more useful.

“I wager everyone calling Facebook a fad is over 40. (and most likely has no social life)”

Shoot and score.

The real question is how bad does Zuckerberg feel for turning down the $1bn offer when he had it. I don’t see an IPO happening anytime soon and I don’t see the valuation going anywhere near what they first predicted.

Sorry Richie. I am much younger than 40 but old enough to vividly remember GeoCities. The buzz around them was similar except we used to call it “community” not “social”. The jargon’s better now but the fad remains the same. Facebook is a good idea — and I like the business but the valuation is a joke and NOT sustainable. If they had a very bright future their Chief Revenue Officer wouldn’t have left yesterday — that kind of stuff simply doesn’t happen without a good reason.

I’ve been sick of facebook for a long time, and all these apps made it even worse. Now half the time, the pages either don’t load or crash your browser alltogether.

I’m not ready to declare that “the sky is falling” on FaceBook. Of course, there will be attrition, as with any site. Old people will leave, new people will come.

As with any fast-growing site, there’s going to come a time where you “just about” saturate your exposure, and adoption starts to level off. Call me crazy, but I think this is all that’s happening here.

Maybe people finally realize that Social Networks are lame. Maybe they have been slowly migrating back to, god forbid, face to face interactions.
Thoughts???

Totally agree, bisbrandt. My point is in relation to their valuation, which, in my opinion, doesn’t make any sense and will actually hurt their new employees who must have shares with a strike price in the billions of dollars — a ridiculous level for a company that has proven little financially.

Friendster: 2002-2003
MySpace: 2004-2005
Facebook: 2006-2008

There’s a pattern to social networking sites. The only question is who is going to replace Facebook and become the next billionaire. Maybe it is not one site, but a bunch of niche sites for people that like different things, SkiSpace for people that want a social network for skiing and imeem for people who want one based on music etc.

thats fine deleo, but if myspace died three years ago then why does it still have the most users and activity out of all of them?

Yeah, I completely agree regarding the valuation. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it does give one pause as to whether or not there was more than just FaceBook being considered when it was done. For the valuation to be that high, it’s almost as if someone was trying to put value and justification into a market that hasn’t yet earned it.

older people don’t use as much/ and eventually let’s face it they die. The younger kids I know are all on myyearbook.com, so if they’re already entrenched in 1 SN then why would they move to another? They’d only move if their friends moved. So I’d be cautious about saying that newer people will continue to drive growth.

I used to *love* going to Facebook. Now I vary between *hating* going to Facebook and merely tolerating. I still go for certain specific purposes but the App thing is such a pain to deal with. My guess is that when all is said in done the whole Facebook app thing is going to be looked at as one of the largest value subtraction exercises in history…and not because there aren’t good apps/app developers, etc. but rather because Facebook refuses to give people the opportunity to avoid/block apps if they seem them as more annoying than useful.

Let’s face reality here. Success is going to kill FB. They became incredibly popular, outgrew their first market niche (university/highschool kids) . FB was THE site for a while with all the early adapters.

FB began to lose its appeal when these kid’s parents joined up and started getting involved in their kid’s stuff. Who wants their parents seeing their druken escapades from the weekend? I heard one parent admonish their grown child for having a “potty mouth” on their profile page.

The second problem they created (mentioned over and over in other posts) was the amount of noise and spam on the site. It lost it clean look/feel and became confused and tired.

A good post mortem of the road to success for FB is needed, then we can look to the next polular site to improve on it, and to monetize it somehow.

@Humble Pie

“Would you spend time on FB and others, making money for someone else, or would you be better off starting your own network on Ning, or your own blog, and start building something that’s all yours???”

Exactly what i’ve been thinking the last couple weeks.. which is why i’m about 48 hours away from launching my own ‘wall’ on a domain that i own, for my own friends and family.

http://starsite.com/wall

I don’t need to collect a bunch of personal info, have no need to ‘app spam’ everyone, and don’t want to litter the site it with seizure inducing ads. It’s running on Wordpress with the newly available ‘Prologue’ theme. Easy. Thank you Joseph and Matt!

A lot of my friends and family wont ever be on sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc.. so if i can throw up a simple blog and bring them to me, they wont have to worry about spam or privacy issues. They can follow topics/tags (RSS) or just subscribe to one other. Time will tell whether or not this ’sticks’.

* crosses fingers *

Facebook for BlackBerry delivers all important messages to me so there’s no point in actually visiting the website (unless I want to kill time).

#41 et al, if you believe the “valuation” you are totally naive. MS paid FB a payment for advertising and FB dressed it up as an equity investment. FB is in no way worth the over-hyped $15bn.

ps if you can remember Geocities that reinforces my point about having no social life.

Bet on business networks (LinkedIn, Fast Pitch!, Xing)…

They’ve not only figured out how to monetize their platforms beyond advertising, but they are less prone to becoming a fad - as most people depend on them to enhance their careers and market their business long after their college days are behind them.

#55 - pfft! how is linked in making any money? The only people who use it are IT middle managers.

Already peaked, now it’s downhill.

Bad timing Suckerberg, you shoulda sold it for $4B, in a couple of years it will be worthless.

@56 Richie,

right on.

@ Richie Cunningham:
I don’t know about LinkedIn, but XING is (!) making money. They btw already IPOed.

Is the bottom chart supposed to be for MySpace? The legend says it is Facebook which seems to contradict the top chart. What am I missing.

It amazes me how many people comment to say ‘yeah facebook is finished’ without looking at the graph. The current leveling off is identical to the one that happened last year, and which gave way to renewed growth in February last year. I suspect that TC even had a similarly wrong post about it back then.

hi5 & Friendster both did extremely work in the past month. They grew 20% month over month.

Looks like Facebook’s international strategy might be the best way out of this rut.

I wouldn’t think it’s not within expectation of the facebook mgmt to see this coming..

I’d love to see an initiative for creating an open source social network in the style of wikipedia, sponsored by IBM, Sun, Intel, HP or alike, with no ads and a completely open data in/out policy, where you feel good about investing all your time and data.

One issue for Facebook…too much drama. There’s always something swirling around the company. As Google went through its growth phase, I don’t recall nearly so much drama around it.

My ten reasons for Facebook fatigue here: http://tinyurl.com/yq8bbe.

Finally, I wouldn’t count these guys out. They’re still the “it” company for social networking, have a lot of money and smart folks. I expect they’ll innovate some things that’ll change this.

Richie (#29, #36, and #56), y get so defensive about facebook? face it, the site has jumped the shark, lost its personality, and now full of nonsense apps and spam-like messages. this coming from a 25 year old, who used to use the site religiously while in school. i’d venture to say that the only 30-40 year olds using fb are guys like u, pretending to have a social life by collecting and poking facebook friends.

btw, people actually pay linkedin and xing for premium accounts. business social networks also command higher cpms for their traffic. e.g. linkedin has ROS demographic data that is comparable to the wsj and forbes (per nielen @plan stats).

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I tried Facebook but found it to be overpopulated with really wierd and useless applications, that actually got in the way of chatting with friends…so I no longer endorse nor use Facebook. I prefer much more Stumble Upon for social networking. Otherwise, nice article. Regards, Keith Johnson, Author “365 Great Affirmations”.

Good, USEFUL, apps will keep Facebook sailing. Check out http://www.kyte.tv for the next thing in Web 2.0. Create a channel, post video, pictures, audio, slideshows, text/video/audio chat. Embed it on your myspace, facebook, blog, you name it. You can also produce instantly and on-the-go with your mobile phone. It’s pretty cool and also a great way to promote music, film, etc. I’m hooked.

What if millions of Facebook users organized a coordinated boycott and held the site hostage for ransome - say, $10 billion, to be deposited into a certain bank account and divided up among the boycotters? If members boycotted the site for a while, they could hold up all merger and sale talks, and collapse the valuation of the site.

The comScore numbers/demographics are way out of whack when compared to the figures that Facebook is giving out. There is a 10 million user difference (comScore higher) and with the older age groups there is a 10x factor discrepancy between comScore and Facebook’s own figures:

comScore Facebook
Age 35+ 14,687,000 1,745,080
50+ 5,360,000 496,580

http://cpmadvisors.com/2008/fa.....-now-2296/

To the guys defending FB and saying it is leveling off, etc. The big problem with FB is they are really good at spending money, but totally suck at making money. Monetizing that is. Comparisons to MySpace don’t really hold up because MySpace banks big time. Whereas FB gained initial popularity in not have all the spam and ads of MySpace. The FB spam platform has now wrestled the crown from Myspace bulletins and is now stunting their growth, and even with all this spam they still don’t know how to make money. FB will eventually be forced to monetize by flooding their pages with low eCPM display ads. This will seriously drive down their user base. I think they are looking forward to a friendsterlike future after a big crisis drama plays out (i.e. executive team taken out back and shot) around the end of this year since they will be starving for cash with no hope of profitability and declining user base. FB will burn through their funding paying a premium on talent for the commodity skills of endlessly tweaking their spam platform until the cash flow crisis can no longer be ignored. This should be pretty fun to watch.

@69 Thanks for playing your part in speeding the FB decline. I’m sure TC loves your spam too.

#12 Agree with you. I´m fed up of its format, the annoying invitations (I have no APIs right now), and all the idiotic groups created everyday.

The chart is probably not true. There are a lot of people signing up in emerging economies that are still experiencing high Internet growth in numbers and density… like for example India. The chart above (compete and alexa) - dont factor in the falling ratio of people with the alexa bar as compared to those without. Most newbies in these countries do not have the bars installed - and so the ratio drops, and therefore the chart (since it depends on a static / old ratio which is not updated on the fly) automatically reflects a fall. Not sure you guys get what I am saying… but this seems to be one obvious reason for the drop. (The RATIO and metrics being used are old and not dynamically updated to take into account the LARGE number of new people who surf without the bars)… get it?

Keep it simple, keep it clean, thats what we all want

oh, and a few dollars to develop it more…

http://www.exiva.com
share your life, treasure the privacy

hi,

I actually heard from someone, that facebook would get bigger. and myspace would see a decline.

I use both, i guess they have their advantages and dissadvantages.

steve