We’re all -except from one of your classmates- members of the Facebook family. And probably most of your friends and family-members are contributing to this huge social network. Facebook is an easy way to keep everybody updated -whether they want it or not- and keep in touch with your friends from all over the world. So you may think the decline of Facebook will never come. But some say the decline has already begun…
Just three years ago, Facebook active users grew immense. Just in one year (2008-2009) the number of Facebook users almost doubled!
(Smith, J., http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/14/facebook-surpasses-175-million-users-continuing-to-grow-by-600k-usersday/)
But Brett Ryan talks in his article ‘Facebook Losing Users: Is This the End Of the Social Network?‘ about the decline of Facebook. He says:
In early December 2012, Facebook traffic dipped by nearly 1.4 million users. … in an absolute sense, it’s like losing the entire population of San Diego in users in just one month.
According to Brett, there are two aspects that can explain the decline in the popularity of Facebook. First, there is the aspect of market saturation: the market is in the maturity stage. The outflow of people, e.g. the people who want a Facebook ‘sabbatical’, has a greater impact compared to the years before. That’s because the inflow of new users has slowed down.
The second reason Brett mentions is, I think, a sub reason for the previous one. Facebook is a business, and businesses need to earn money. The social network is experimenting with ways to make the users pay fee for certain actions, e.g. $100 for sending a direct message to a person who isn’t in your list of friends. People get irritated, maybe even angry, and want to take a Facebook break.
And Brett isn’t the only one who thinks the decline of Facebook has begun. Douglas Rushkoff, author of ‘How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back‘, says the net isn’t the place where you can create loyalty and Facebook isn’t a permanent company (see video below).
And that’s not all. There is even a website! I have to say, it’s a small guess that it is really about the end of Facebook: I can only read English, Dutch, French and German. But I think the name of the site says it all: http://www.theendoffacebook.com/
I use Facebook all the time. But these days, I notice I sometimes get irritated. I’m not interested in where you go to the gym or another picture of your Starbucks coffee with your name on it (applause for the employee who spelled your name correct!). I think Douglas is right and people will not always be loyal to Facebook. I probably won’t. Do you guys agree? Or do you think Facebook will survive, no matter what, like the Spice Girls?
Article B. Ryan: http://www.policymic.com/articles/23835/facebook-losing-users-is-this-the-end-of-the-social-network
