Facebook. The most downloaded app, reaching more than two billion people.
Facebook. Facilitating the share of 300 million shared photos daily.
Facebook. The social media companies love to utilize.
Facebook. Inventor of “surveillance capitalism”.
While our (students of this class) affinity with Facebook in the past decade has been second to none in terms of social media, western millennials’ connection to the tech-giant has taken multiple hits. Recent turmoil within the organization is yet another reason that our engagement with the organization is about to lose its ‘cru’.
Looking at the broad picture it can be a tough case arguing for turning the alarm light on. Charts analyzing revenue, profits, and number of daily active users (DAU) has the same curvature as a Tour de France stage ending at Col du Tourmalet (Statista, 2018) – a deadly ascending slope. However, the immense introduction of advertisers and their strong embeddedness within the social media was a turning point for many millennials (Sweney, 2018). Moreover, Cambridge Analytica incident have, in addition to a plummeting stock price, caused multiple corporations to erode their connection to the social media (The Straits Times, 2018).
Adding to the progressive flames, field studies indicate that the first big chunk of three million under 25’s in the US and UK alone will leave the site (Ibid.). These number were conducted prior to September’s security breach where 50 million users had their information stolen!
The turbulence concerning the business model and the vulgar use of advertisers and the questionable ethics of the management has led to concerns. Both for users, but likewise from the advertisers who pay for the ongoing life of the media. Unilever, the world’s second advertiser (Kollewe, 2018), threatens to pull advertising from Facebook.
This leaves the question: Are Facebook going to survive this turbulent time – and if so, how will these incidents impact the organization’s business model?
Source:
Kollewe, J. (2018) The Guardian, Business, Economics Banking Money Markets Project Syndicate B2B, website: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/feb/12/marmite-unilever-ads-facebook-google
Statista (2018) Overview, Webiste: https://www.statista.com/topics/751/facebook/
Sweney, M. (2018) The Guardian, ‘Parents killed it’: why Facebook is losing its teenage users, website: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/16/parents-killed-it-facebook-losing-teenage-users
The Straits Times (2018) Cambridge Analytica: Impact and backlash, Website: https://www.straitstimes.com/world/cambridge-analytica-impact-and-backlash
