Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?
As a university lecturer, my wife occasionally gets a glimpse of what today’s young adults are excited about, no matter how perplexing that excitement might be, and sometimes she passes those tidbits on to me. Something one of her students told her this week has left me wondering if Facebook has jumped the shark and is about to die a slow, lingering death.
The Facebook Phenomenon
By all accounts, Facebook is an Internet phenomenon. What started out as an exclusive site for university and college students (you needed a college email address to sign up) has grown into a global social networking site on the same scale as MySpace. According to Alexa, and I know Alexa’s numbers aren’t perfect, Facebook ranks #6 globally. (The top 5 as of today are: Yahoo!, YouTube, Windows Live, Google and MySpace. One could argue, though, that the Google and YouTube numbers should be combined, since they’re both owned by Google, which would make Google either #1 or #2. But I digress.) Here’s the latest traffic snapshot:
Looks great, doesn’t it? A steady upward growth that any site would be thrilled to have. Facebook’s even been in the news lately for nabbing two high-profile Google executives. So what makes me think that Facebook may have jumped the shark?
Facebook “isn’t interesting”
Back to my wife’s student. According to her, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Facebook isn’t interesting anymore to me and my friends.”
OK, that’s a sample size of 1. Or maybe more than one, since she implied it wasn’t just her. Do a bit of digging, though, and you find others expressing similar views:
- Quitting Facebook
- Are the cool kids leaving Facebook?
- Who will give students their Facebook back?
- Why I quit Facebook
If Facebook’s core constituency is slowly leaving, where does that leave Facebook?
More Numbers
Back to the Alexa numbers. Traffic is up, but it looks like the average page views per visitor are going down:
In fact, the average number of pages viewed per unique visitor this week was 23, down from 26 page views a few months ago. Looking at the graph, there was a definite dip at the beginning of February, although I’m not sure what caused that. I do know my wife’s students are concerned with the privacy issues around personalized advertising that Facebook introduced last fall to a lot of flack.
SocialAds: The Facebook Shark
Ten years from now, historians will try to define exactly when Facebook jumped the shark. There are two strong possibilities: when Facebook opened itself to everyone, or when it introduced the SocialAds advertising system.
My bet is on the latter, because of the negative publicity and privacy concerns it engendered. The aforementioned student referred to it, as have others in the commentaries I’ve followed online. While people rarely object to a shopping site making recommendations based on past purchases, having a social networking site passing along information about your preferences and purchases seems to cross an unwritten line in the sand. Too much like Big Brother, it would seem.
Of course, I have no idea if Facebook is in decline or not. This is all speculation on my part. Only the Facebook execs know for sure, and maybe that’s why they went out looking for talented individuals to help them beat back the shark and still make decent money (a problem for many social networking sites).
If I were them, though, I’d be worried.
P.S.: Eric Giguere on Facebook
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Eric Giguere is the author of several printed books and knows a thing or two about content monetization. Subscribe to his AdSense blog today and never miss any of his insightful comments. And the not-so-insightful ones, for that matter.
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AdSense, advertising, Facebook, Google, jumping the shark, MySpace, SocialAds
Comments
One Response to “Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?”
I personally find facebook very irritating and its getting difficult to follow especially with so much alerts going on.