

Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers (2014) - xyby
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-princeton-researchers-infectious-disease

======
wanderingstan
Should add a "(2014)" to the title. This is a year old and already discussed
here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904)

EDIT: And Facebook issued a reply here: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-
develin/debunking-prince...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-
develin/debunking-princeton/10151947421191849)

------
crumpled
Does facebook need users?

Considering shadow profiles, and the wide base of installation on websites all
over the world, they can continue with big data generation without anyone ever
reaching out to them.

Instagram continues to grow, along with Whatsapp. The facebook (shadow
profile) data and the real user profiles of those apps will be correlated and
ads will be targeted to users on those platforms.

They will lose revenue from the owners of facebook "pages", but I'd be willing
to bet that they will expand their API to to serve facebook ads on web sites,
if they feel the need to bandage that platform when they have some more
desirable platforms already underway.

------
chrisdone
This idea is old. A few years ago someone claimed "Facebook is not cool
anymore, now your parents are on it" and predicted an exodus of teenagers
leaving. Didn't happen. Facebook is useful because it's full of people. It
thrives on popularity. It's not run on being cool. Unless they make a Digg
move and really screw up, people aren't going to drop it.

~~~
themagician
I question a lot of this. Everyone I know uses it less and less. Teenagers do,
at least to me and everyone I know, seem to be using it less and less or
foregoing it all together. In terms of ROI on ad spend, it seems to be
decreasing for every client I work with. At the same time, clients are
spending more and more. ROI down, revenue up. It's a rather bizarre scenario.

I'm starting to wonder if Facebook is cooking the books a little bit. Perhaps
an outlandish statement since I can't substantiate it beyond personal
experience, but that is how it feels.

~~~
snowwrestler
Teenagers absolutely expect each other to have a Facebook account, and many
use Messenger. They're not doing as many News Feed posts as older users
though.

------
sarciszewski
> John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university's mechanical and
> aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number
> of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term.

Yeah, that's not really a reliable metric if people have Facebook apps on
their smartphones and set their homepage to Facebook now is it?

~~~
emerongi
It was discussed later on in the article, but I do agree - the article is
pretty bad; not much information on the study. I was expecting a detailed
explanation of the methods ("equations") used, yet there wasn't much to back
the title up. Feels like it was written just because some quota had to be met.

------
jtth
Search query data is not a reliable proxy for a platform people know as well
as or better than Google.

------
lord_quas
orly? Based purely on the number of searches made for Facebook?

This is a terrible, baseless prediction that should not be published by the
guardian or linked to Hacker News.

