
Facebook is King, Other Networks Fight for Scraps - etr71115
http://blog.naytev.com/facebook-is-king/
======
greg___
I have visited a local community center event website for 15 years. They
recently moved over to Facebook. Their feed is public. If I don't have the FB
app or am not logged into FB, it's almost as if there is an entire division of
losers, sitting around at Facebook cooking up ways to make me login or install
the app. From are you a robot unreadable captcha's, to denying the page
exists, to limiting the number of posts, limiting readable post content, its
ridiculous.

Whether they are king or not, all I am ever going to remember them for is
taking a gigantic shit over what the Internet is supposed to mean.

~~~
artursapek
I tried viewing the Facebook page for my local goban meetup recently to check
on a schedule, and FB put a giant floating translucent white box over the
bottom half of my screen with a single "login" button in the middle of it. So
I could see there was content below but it was incredibly hard to read. There
was not even an "X" button to close it. What it was saying was "join our
website or get the hell out".

I understand enforcing login for write operations, since it's obviously
required, but they really do seem to have no regard for the original ideals of
the internet. They're not alone; Quora and others have done similarly stupid
shit.

These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet
and technology, but it's sad to see capitalism take hold in such an ugly way.

~~~
wlesieutre
I've found Kill Sticky [1] to be an incredibly useful bookmarket lately. It
finds any DOM element with "position: fixed" and deletes it. Wish I didn't
need to use it so often, but here we are.

Sometimes for annoying popups covering content, sometimes for the sidebar of
brightly colored floating social widgets, sometimes just the enormous fixed
banner that continues to waste screen real estate after you've scrolled down.

I use it a lot on my laptop and haven't tried JS bookmarklets in mobile
browsers, but I'd hope that they work by now?

[1] [https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-
headers/](https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/)

~~~
endemic
That is brilliant. For Mobile Safari, copy the bookmarklet source, create a
"dummy" bookmark, then go back and edit it. Delete the URL and type in
`javascript:` and paste the JS.

------
skywhopper
The selection of websites listed is sort of weird. Buzzfeed I get but the
others aren't high on my radar. I'm guessing the graphs would look different
with different websites to analyze.

But more than that, this analysis sort of presents a tautology. Yes, Facebook
is king of Facebook-style sharing. No one is surprised. What, you say
Pinterest doesn't have a ton of National Geographic articles shared compared
to Facebook? Not a surprise, given the nature of Pinterest. Twitter is also
not the same sort of social network. LinkedIn? Google+? These are not the same
sorts of sites at all.

Meanwhile, the article totally ignores Tumblr, Snapchat, and who knows what
other sites I know nothing about.

In summary, Facebook has won at being Facebook. Other sites have different
purposes, and their users use them differently.

~~~
skewart
I had the same thought. It was a bizarre selection of media companies and
other "social" sites. It seems like either naive, amateur analysis, or else
they cherry picked the data to make a popular perception of fb look as
dramatically true as possible. I'm inclined to give their integrity the
benefit of the doubt and assume they just didn't really think this one
through.

------
Raphmedia
Tell that to tweens and teens. Yes, they are on it, but they don't spend time
browsing it. They are social in other apps.

~~~
plaidturtle
As a person close to the "teen" demographic, I can tell you that teens still
use Facebook. Thinking of social media as a zero sum game is a common mistake;
each has its own use case. For instance, Facebook is usually used when
chatting on desktop/laptop with friends, adding new people you met, or
chatting with people who you aren't really close to. Also, Facebook is widely
used for groups and events, which no other social media provides. Snapchat
might have replaced some aspect of the Facebook newsfeed but people still post
things on Facebook. When a teen says, "omg Facebook is like so old and no one
ever uses it". They mean to say that they don't use it as much but they still
use it for things I mentioned.

Edit: It is important to note that Facebook has the "identity" aspect down
like no other.

~~~
bduerst
Except that attention span _is_ a zero sum game.

Facebook's (et al) business model success is correlated with the amount of
time you are under their umbrella.

~~~
plaidturtle
People don't necessarily have to be "on" Facebook for Facebook to collect data
about their user. Many apps connect to Facebook. So they can collect data even
when people are not using Facebook. The more people use Facebook connected
services, the more data Facebook collects about users. Which means better ads
for the users & better data for businesses.

~~~
bduerst
Right, being "on" Facebook isn't a prereq for being under their umbrella.

Snapchat, Vine, and other networks are not under that umbrella, meaning it's
still a zero sum game. These companies are competing for your attention, for
which there is limited supply.

------
sulam
I have trouble believing that G+ outstrips Twitter when it comes to social
sharing. I think there is likely something at play other than that which isn't
captured by this analysis. For instance, Twitter doesn't auto load articles
the way G+ and FB do, so perhaps there is a distinction to be made there. At
any rate, if G+ was this successful, I think we can all agree Google wouldn't
have killed / pivoted it, which means the data is suspect in some way.

~~~
andersen1488
Honestly those numbers are most likely almost entirely automated bots. G+ is
popular with content mills to get their page ranking up. Think about it for a
moment, do you know ANYONE at all that uses G+ for anything?

~~~
NoGravitas
It appears to me that G+ has found a different niche than Facebook. Facebook
is for seeing posts from people you know (mostly people you know but don't see
often or at all, like college friends or your aunt). G+ is for seeing posts
from people you share interests with. Yes, FB has groups and pages for that
kind of thing, but it just seems to have clicked better on G+.

------
petewailes
It's an interesting piece, but I'd be more interested in analysis looking at
the why behind that. What is it about the audience on the site, and the way
the sites are presenting their content that is driving the non-FB sharing?
Obviously this would need to be done with more sites than just those here.
However, for a quick analysis, I nosed around three...

Billboard have Facebook and Twitter sharing buttons on their articles, but not
G+, so it's fair to assume that the G+ sharing is going on on the G+ platform,
not from the site itself.

Similarly, hovering over any image on TipHero presents share buttons for
Facebook and Pinterest, and the bottom of their articles present a huge Share
on Facebook button. However, no Twitter share button means they're getting
nothing from that, and presumably not interacting in any way on G+ either.

There's a similar story again with Bleacher Report, which has Facebook and
Twitter buttons (but interestingly no Twitter shares - possibly the wrong
audience?), the same for every image, and Facebook, Twitter and G+ share
buttons at the base of each article.

I think the takeaways from this are, Facebook is massive and cannot be ignored
if you're publishing content, whilst everything else is dependent on whether
or not your audience is there. But even if they are, the numbers in terms of
engagement is going to be vastly lower, so can't be a priority.

My concern with this would be that, given that that's the case, this becomes a
dynamo for Facebook, as the more they become the dominant platform, the less
time anyone will spend working to build an audience anywhere else. Possibly
Twitter is an exception to this, depending on the publication, but I wouldn't
bet the farm on it.

------
nickbauman
Remember In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC firm (let that sink in for a moment) was one
of the earliest investors in Facebook.

------
dredmorbius
While measurement, methodology, and focus were different (my goal was seeking
intelligent discussion online), the results may be of interest.

I ran Google searches across multiple domains representing major social media
networks, publications, and a few other classes of sites including academic
institutions, government, and various foreign TLDs.

Search terms were names from the _Foreign Policy_ Top 100 Global Thinkers list
(selected as representative of more intellectual dicussion), the arbitrarily
selected text string "Kim Kardashian" as negative indicator, and a search for
the word "this" (a common English word) to get a proxy for total English-
language content on a given site or domain.

Facebook dominated by total count, though s/n as represented by the FP:KK
index (see link) was highest at Metafilter, with Reddit doing admirably. Blogs
though had very nearly as much content as FB and generally far more length and
relevance.

My read is that there's an untapped market for meaningful discussion on blogs
from whoever manages to solve the problems of discoverability, discussion,
relevance, reputation, and spam.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/)

------
abpavel
Should add "in the English speaking world". Baidu, vkontakte, etc. have their
own regional powers.

~~~
CM30
There's actually a few interesting stories there about how Facebook has been
beating out quite a few of these regional networks in recent years. For
example, they've unseated Mixi in Japan and Cyworld in South Korea:

[http://www.digitalintheround.com/japan-mixi-
facebook/](http://www.digitalintheround.com/japan-mixi-facebook/)

[http://www.digitalintheround.com/south-korea-cyworld-
faceboo...](http://www.digitalintheround.com/south-korea-cyworld-facebook/)

There are quite a few interesting stories like that, about how certain
regionally popular services seem to be losing popularity compared to their
international competitors.

~~~
wodenokoto
> unseated Mixi in Japan

I think it is debatable whether it was Facebook or Line that unseated Mixi.
Looking at how my Japanese friends use their phones I would say it was Line.

------
brador
People underestimate how quickly Facebook could be overtaken. Look at Whatsapp
and ask yourself what if Facebook hadn't purchased them when they did?

It is inevitable that someday something will fly under the radar or an owner
will be unwilling to sell.

~~~
ma2rten
Like snapchat?

~~~
minionslave
They need a desktop version

~~~
Throwaway23412
Why? If anything, Snapchat's success shows that they don't need a desktop
version. Mobile usage in the U.S. now exceeds desktop usage. I'm having a hard
time believing that anyone on the Snapchat team is stressing out about having
a desktop version.

------
erikb
I think this kind of analysis is not worth much. Not that it was done badly
(I'm not good enough to judge that). In every market you have two kinds of
profitable companies: The market leader who owns the huge thing. And you have
niches. Both of them can be very profitable but in different ways.

HN is certainly no social leader, but I would consider it a huge success. And
while it may not even make money in a direct way, it's a huge part of the
success of the brand YCombinator. Are these scraps? I don't think so. In fact,
given the choice, I'd rather work at HN than at FB. I'd rather own shares of
YC as well (in that regard YC may even be too big for what I like). And as you
can see right now, I'd rather talk to people here than on FB as well.

------
chrischen
Facebook is still living mostly off its network effects. It's still not King
in many Foregn markets, and I'm not even counting China since they are
explicitly blocked there. So they don't necessarily have product superiority,
just network effects.

~~~
acchow
Some would say the network is the product.

------
alistproducer2
Side note: The conversion of the bar chart y-axis from linear to logarithmic
made logarithmic graphs "click" for me. Goes to show you, you can learn
something when you least expect it.

------
haddr
I wonder if such result might be a result of some methodological error (not
representative sample, some metric calculations biases, click frauds, etc).
Otherwise this is rather sad article :(

------
larakerns
The inability to monitor their whole network for scam advertising might
cripple facebook's dominance as their main revenue source becomes less
trusting but the scale of their operations relies on that consistent revenue:

More on the ad scams: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/say-no-to-the-
dress](http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/say-no-to-the-dress)

~~~
55555
I doubt if, if only because the entire web and even offline world is equally
filled with ad scams too. Go look at anything advertised via taboola our
outbrain. :-/

------
danbruc
If nothing unexpected happens, Facebook will be dead by 2020 [1].

[1]
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook)

~~~
joering2
Interesting. What is this based of off?

~~~
danbruc
It's the normalized search volume for the term »facebook« on Google. It is not
too straight forward to interpret but I thought about it for some time and I
am still convinced it is a pretty good indicator for Facebook's future.

For example users switching from desktop browsers to apps will no longer go to
facebook.com by searching for »facebook« in the address bar and therefore
lower the search volume. On the other hand people searching for solutions for
issues with Facebook should still track the size of the user base. The same
holds for developers interested in Facebook APIs, authors researching Facebook
for articles and so on.

You can almost always come up with explanations why the search volume should
go down over time, developers already knowing the APIs, Facebook maturing and
therefore causing less and less issues for users, users maturing and therefore
being better able to deal with issues without searching and so on.

But if you look at similar cases like MySpace [1], Google+ [2], ICQ [3], the
German StudiVZ and MeinVZ [4], the search volume on Google was always a really
good indicator for the fate of those platforms and I don't have enough
convincing arguments to believe that Facebook manages to counter this trend.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=myspace](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=myspace)

[2]
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=google%2B](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=google%2B)

[3]
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=icq](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=icq)

[4]
[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=studivz%2C%20meinvz](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=studivz%2C%20meinvz)

~~~
what_ever
Well as people move towards using mobile and apps more and more, wouldn't they
search Facebook on Google less and less?

------
Animats
From an advertiser perpective, there's Google, there's Facebook, and there's
everybody else. Ignoring everybody else doesn't seem to reduce sales.

------
Hoasi
King, yes, for the time being maybe; yet I can't help but think Facebook's
presence / dominance will wane eventually.

------
acd
This not true. Facebook is not king any more. Do a Google trends comparison
and you will find that peak Facebook was in 2013.

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0glpjll%2C%20...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0glpjll%2C%20%2Fm%2F0h3tm0f%2C%20%2Fm%2F0289n8t%2C%20%2Fm%2F02y1vz&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-2)

~~~
catwell
Remove Facebook, add WhatsApp.

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0glpjll%2C%20...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0glpjll%2C%20%2Fm%2F0h3tm0f%2C%20%2Fm%2F0289n8t%2C%20%2Fm%2F0gwzvs1&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-2)

Both Instagram and WhatsApp belong to Facebook.

------
xufi
There was a time when Twitter wanted to be king and Snapchat and well Fb sure
dominated them all

------
ypeterholmes
Seems remiss not to include reddit in this analysis no?

------
meeper16
Google is King.

\- Gmail 1bil users \- Youtube billions \- Search \- Android \- Self Driving
cars

and the list goes on including an order of magnitude greater in revenue.

Facebook is the friendster, geocities the next AOL etc.

Google is a real technology company.

~~~
tombert
I don't like Facebook, nor do I have an account, but I disagree somewhat with
them not being a "real technology company".

Facebook hired Simon Marlow, one of the creators of Haskell, and publishes a
lot of research and open-source projects. Cassandra DB, HHVM, React, React-
Native and Hack are just a couple examples.

They write blog posts about what scales and what does not, and employ a number
of post-grad researchers. How are they not a "real" technology company?

~~~
deftnerd
I agree. It's not just software either. Their work on OpenCompute, which
opensources datacenter designs and server designs, has also done really
impressive work. Their interest in Occulus shows their appreciation of
advances in IO hardware.

~~~
GauntletWizard
Facebook is where these techs go to die. Facebook has a lot of interest in
these projects, and a lot of cool, smart, motivated people working there. But
they have no cohesion, no direction, and no way to build on top of one another
- Everyone at Facebook is constantly re-inventing the wheel.

