It’s a sign many have been looking for for some time now. Facebook’s user base seems to be shrinking – but don’t expect Facebook to go down the way of MySpace any time soon.
You’ve never heard of MySpace? That’s right – the fall from grace of that once seemingly all-powerful and all-reaching social network was so complete once, but few people even remember it today.
In fact, a decade or so ago, MySpace perished largely at the hands of Facebook’s more adaptable and free-for-all business model.
Yet, Facebook is made of a different substance – not least of a critical mass of some 2.4 billion people who use it every day. Like that commercial goes – imagine if those 2.4 billion people one day decided to do anything else, any other one thing instead of logging into their Facebook accounts? A scary thought, perhaps.
But as it is, there is also no rival on Facebook’s the horizon, so thinking that a recent – and not so recent – spate of privacy and political scandals might have hurt the company’s userbase bottom line may just be wishful thinking.
Data from the analytics company Mixpanel has found that things such as likes, shares, and posts have dropped by almost 20%, according to the Guardian, since the “Cambridge Analytica scandal” of April 2018.
But as it is, there is also no rival on Facebook’s the horizon, so thinking that a recent – and not so recent – spate of privacy and political scandals might have hurt the company’s userbase bottom line may just be wishful thinking.
And then the overall engagement fell by ten percent over a month in the fall and winter 2018, to spring back to life somewhat during the US mid-term elections.
But Facebook has its own statics, also quoted in the article, that said more people logged in to the site both monthly and daily during the year ending March 2019.
A market research firm eMarketer said this could all be explained in plain terms: US users were spending 38 minutes this year on average on the social behemoth compared to 41 minutes in 2017.
In addition, eMarketer made the claim nowadays as old as the hills: the social platform “continues to lose young users.”
Now that’s one super important metric we’ll all have to see when we actually see it.
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