When researchers from Princeton University published a paper earlier this year suggesting that Facebook might lose 80 per cent of its users by 2017, the internet roared in anticipation.
Despite the fact that the work was incredibly speculative (a point that was hammered home by Facebook’s own data engineers who used the same methods of “scholarly scholarliness” to prove that Princeton itself was on the brink of non-existence) the apocalyptic prediction chimed with our intuitions about Facebook: surely they can’t keep this up forever.
Today, the statistics that define the site are as impressive as ever. Facebook has 1.23 billion users generating 6 billion likes and 350 million photos every day. Profits for 2013 soared above $1.5 billion with revenue growing by 63 per cent in the fourth quarter. Currently valued at $135 billion, Facebook is set to become the fastest company ever to reach $150 billion.
Ten years ago Facebook didn’t even exist, so what’s going to happen to it over the next 10?
Theory one: everybody leaves.
What is obvious is that Facebook can’t continue to grow at its current rate. Almost half of the world’s internet-connected population is already signed up to the service and its slowing user accumulation has convinced some (the Princeton researchers among them) that the site’s days are numbered.
Metcalfe’s law – the proposition that the more users that are signed up to a social network, the more valuable and popular that network becomes – has helped Facebook grow, but some think that the same concept could also be its downfall. The argument goes: if the slow exodus of users from Facebook begins to snowball then the site’s fortunes could turn more quickly than My Space’s.
However, there is a major problem with this theory: Facebook isn’t Myspace. Unlike Myspace, Facebook has come to prominence at a time when ‘socialness’ operates as a layer over the internet in the same way that the internet has become a layer over our everyday lives, and Zuckerberg’s social network is just too deeply embedded into the social fabric of the net to ever go away.
The site controls just under half of all ‘social logins’ online (registering for other sites using your Facebook profile) and although rivals like Google+ have been catching up, Facebook also offers a range of others features – chat, photos, groups – that complement its central, social focus and make it consistently useful. Socialness is the glue that keeps users stuck to the internet – and so, stuck to Facebook as well.
Theory two: teens leave.
Alongside Princeton’s doom-like prophecies, another bit of research that supposedly signaled the end of Facebook came from Professor Daniel Miller of University College London, whose paper on the site’s shifting demographics included the quotation that with 16-18 year olds the site was “basically dead and buried”.
Although the paper itself was far from the sort of one-sided Facebook-bashing that the sound bite above suggests (Miller wrote an excellent blog post about how he was interpreted by the press entitled ‘Scholarship, integrity and going viral’) it is true that other services offering more private forms of communication such Snap chat and Twitter hold a greater appeal to younger generations, conscious of the sorts of scrutiny they can be exposed to online.
Thankfully, there’s more to the internet than young people and the same report that showed teens leaving Facebook also recorded a larger growth in usage amongst older people. istrategy Lab’s figures showed that although the 13-17 age group fell by 25 per cent (from 13.1 million to 9.8 million) the 25-34 demographic grew by 33 per cent (33.2 million to 44 million), with far greater growth for the 35-54 age range (up 41 per cent) and 55+ (up 80 per cent).
If you combine this growth with the site’s roster of social features (sharing photos or organizing events for example) then Facebook really isn’t about the sort of fun, ephemeral interactions of single-use apps like snap chat – it covers far more ground among a greater number of users.
Theory three: Facebook goes mobile.
Currently over half of Facebook users access the site via mobile devices, and as smartphones and tablets continue to erode away at the traditional PC and laptop markets this share is only set to grow (for more on this trend see analyst Benedict Evan’s straightforwardly-titled slideshow ‘Mobile is eating the world’).
Although Zuckerberg admitted in a recent interview with Bloomberg that the company’s shift to mobile was “not as quick as it should have been” (failed forays include take-over-your-home screen software Facebook Home and Snap chat-clone Poke) a couple of recent news items show that Facebook’s future is firmly on track.
A recent earnings report showed that 53 per cent of the company’s ad sales now came from mobile (especially impressive considering that two years ago these generated exactly zero revenue) and last week the company also announced the introduction of a new beautiful looking app named Paper.
This is rumored to be only the first in a new suite of apps for mobile that will re-package the Facebook experience for mobile. Paper does away with the complex navigation and confusing options of the site’s current mobile offering, whilst also managing to move the site into the mobile news market – integrating stories from established media outlets with Facebook’s own ‘news feed’.
This seems to be the perfect image of Facebook’s future: as indispensable as your mobile, delivering you news, daily, like your paper. Let’s see what happens in the next ten years.
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