

Why Facebook is Losing US Users - mwbiz
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386884,00.asp

======
far33d
Facebook should be heralded for using a real user engagement metric in the
advertising reach numbers. They could claim every registered user as a "user"
but then they'd be lying (like most other services do).

Given the near total saturation in the US, it's not surprising that their
monthly actives are starting to show some decay from the quality of installs
going down as they grow as well as some seasonal affect.

Basically, the replacement rate of new installs in the US is lower than the
number of people who have not been active in the past 30 days. If we had more
granular data, I'd be willing to bet the loss is primarily in users who
installed recently, not longer-tenure users losing interest or switching
services. Like my mom.

~~~
andrewcooke
that seems a little confused to me.

there is a certain amount of short-term churn: people who signup and then
leave again. if that rate hasn't changed we can ignore them, since the number
leaving this month is made up by the number arriving now who will leave next
month. it comes out in the wash.

then there's the slower loss of long term users, which needs to be balanced by
keeping a few new signups.

so far, the above is more-or-less consistent with what you say. but then you
end with a comment that somehow mixes the two, trying to explain a mismatch in
the second process with people who "even out" in the first.

it would be better to say that one or both of the following (which describe
decline in terms of the two processes outlined above) is happening:

A - the amount of churn is falling off. so the people present for only this
month are less than the people who were only there last month.

B - long term uses that drift away aren't being replaced by new users.

because (B) eats into the entire user base, while (A) is relative to the new
users per month, only (B) can explain a _sustained_ decline (the first process
can't explain a loss of more people than sign up per month).

so we can simply wait and see. if the decline is prolonged then it must be
long-term users that are leaving and not being replaced.

~~~
Kolya
as a guess, i would think the short-term churn has increased.

most heavy users of fb that i know are people that signed up a long time ago.
it was an important part of their social life and most still use the site.

but recently, i've had a few more (older, less tech-savvy) friends on fb. they
'got around' to joining fb eventually. but because it wasn't as important to
their social life to join, and they only bothered doing so after knowing about
fb for a few years, they are more likely to drift away.

i don't know if that's true, but it doesn't sound _too_ unreasonable.

------
flocial
I think there are lots of factors.

Saturation and Fatigue You can only see so many drunken weekend pics before it
gets old.

Everyone's On It Friending your Mom, boss, etc. really makes it suck.

Social Games Pretty much raped the platform. I'm guilty of spamming friends
for poker chips.

Too Many Links News feed is flooded with regurgitated links that are supposed
to be interesting.

Event Spam If the inbox was a real email inbox, some of those invitations
would surely violate some spam law.

It's Everywhere It's hard to find a website that doesn't have like buttons or
commenting or widgets (many have them all). It gets to be a bit much.

------
joebadmo
Whenever there are Facebook stories, some people talk about how well designed
it is. I'm not a user, but whenever I've tried to use my wife's account I've
experienced it as a horribly confusing clutterfest. People talk about the
clean UI design, but I've found it to be the opposite. Even my wife couldn't
explain how to do things without resorting to cargo cult voodoo.

Maybe FB used to be clean and useable, especially compared to MySpace, but is
it really still the case? Am I just an idiot?

Also, in what ways has Facebook been technologically innovative? The other
thing I hear about FB is that their engineering team is amazing and fast.
Again, as a non-user, I really don't know what the feature set is like. I feel
like I don't really hear about genuinely interesting features that much, but
people always talk about the engineering with reverence. Can someone enlighten
me?

~~~
dasil003
The thing about design is it's so much easier to design a simple minimalist
thing vs a feature rich mammoth site that has hundreds of function. FB
succeeds at the latter fairly well. Sure it's not perfect, but they have done
and continue to do a great job with it. Remember, Facebook has a huge,
actively-engaged userbase, so the design is tailored largely for the
experienced user, not the beginner.

Technology-wise the nature of the problem is the impressive thing. They have
hundreds of millions of users visiting the site daily, each one seeing a
completely customized page view on every load. There's no low-hanging fruit
caching wise. What Google does for search or Amazon does for product pages is
of negligible benefit. They were essentially the first company to tackle this
type of problem successfully. Remember, Friendster failed because of this.
MySpace pages loaded at half the speed despite doing only 10% as much.
Facebook innovated at every level of the service. Just look at BigPipe
([http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-
engineering/bigpipe-p...](http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-
engineering/bigpipe-pipelining-web-pages-for-high-performance/389414033919))
as an example of how they optimize the page loading experience itself for
minimal perceived latency (then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels).

~~~
Tiomaidh
>then load Facebook and observe how fast it feels

Considering the scale of the problem, you're right--it's impressively
responsive. But I'd still hesitate to call it fast--on almost every visit,
I'll have pictures that won't load, "like" tooltips that perpetually display
"Loading..." instead of "John Doe liked this", newsfeed loading problems,
etcetera. It could definitely be much faster.

~~~
dasil003
Maybe you have latency to their data centers? For me (in Mountain View) it's
hard to imagine it being any faster. The page appears within 200ms and all the
boxes are completely filled in including images on my main page probably in
under a second.

------
daimyoyo
This is just my experience but the reason I don't use facebook is that the
novelty has worn off. After seen status update after status update in my
timeline I could care less about, I realize why I don't socialize with my old
coworkers and people from high school. We have nothing in common, just like we
had nothing in common back then. If facebook wants to continue to grow they
have a very tough task ahead. They're going to have to redefine the user
experience for people like me who have been on the site for a while, yet
retain enough of that user experience to attract new users. I really think
they missed the boat letting Linkedin IPO before them. The long slow slide to
irrelevancy has begun and that doesn't look good on your S-1.

~~~
eyeareque
Why not just add people who you want to associate with, and not people aren't
significant in your life any longer?

~~~
querulous
have you tried explaining to your coworkers, family or casual friends that you
don't like them enough to add them on facebook? there's a signifigant peer
pressure barrier to not friending people.

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nextparadigms
Facebook has already reached maturity and has become "too mainstream". Plus,
it's a lot less useful than it used to be (more spammy). It's only natural
that early adopters want to move to something else now, or simply quit it
because they got bored with it.

If there would actually be a competitive and disruptive service to switch to
(besides Twitter), Facebook's early adopters would quit it even faster than
they are now. But for now we're just seeing those getting bored with it quit.

Looking forward to see if Diaspora, Altly and Incliq will be those
"disruptive" services to compete with it (though I'm not sure if either of
them will be disruptive or just incremental). Or perhaps something new will
appear soon.

~~~
hugh3
The "next facebook" has to come along eventually. I don't know how it'll
distinguish itself from old-facebook, nor how it'll get traction to start
with, but I'm sure it'll all seem obvious in retrospect. On the other hand the
chances of any individual facebook-replacement taking off are fairly small.

If I were rich I'd set up a YC-equivalent in which I'd sling $30K at anyone
who claims to be building the "next facebook". Think you can do it? Think
you've got a new approach to the problem? Great, here's $30K, I'll take six
percent, see you when you get your first hundred thousand users! One of 'em
has to pay off eventually.

~~~
joshhart
Are you sure about that? It could take a long time.

Would you have bet on Apple if you were trying to find the next Microsoft?
(Would you even consider Apple the next Microsoft?)

What about Google? I don't think there is a "next Google".

Will there be success after Facebook? Of course, but I don't think it will
look like Facebook. So I don't think looking for "the next Facebook" is the
right course of action.

~~~
GrangalanJr
Apple and Google are interesting comparisons. Some significant part of Apple's
success lies in becoming identified with "cool": its products are stylish and
fashionable in addition to being useful. Google's success, on the other hand,
rests very little on that; it started out as pure utility (search), something
people used not because they had lots of friends using it or because it was
"cool" to use it, but because they tried it and it got them the results they
wanted. And even if Google has become known recently as something of a "cool"
company, I don't think that its individual products are identified as "cool"
in the same way Apple's are.

So it may be worth asking: is Facebook more like Google, or more like Apple?
Or in other words: would Facebook survive a demotion from "cool, trendy place
to be" to "utility?" Is such a "demotion" happening as we speak?

~~~
hugh3
Actually I'd say facebook is nothing like Apple or Google, which is why it's
vulnerable. While both Apple and Google benefit from some network effects,
both of 'em have a huge technical lead over the competition in their areas of
expertise. Facebook, though, is all about network effects, so they're much
more susceptible to being overtaken by the next big thing.

------
astine
"Its users will slowly lose interest, moving on to other networks and
platforms (possibly Twitter, or whatever emerges from Apple's iCloud)."

Facebook is not going to be supplanted by Twitter or iCloud, neither of these
serve remotely the same purpose.

~~~
dexen
_> Facebook is not going to be supplanted by Twitter or iCloud..._

...and neither will HTML pages supplant desktop applications or brick-and-
mortar stores, right? Because _neither of these serve remotely the same
purpose_?

That's exactly the way things often go in technology and business. New wins
over incumbents not by attacking them head-on on their home turf, but by
creating a new niche with some interesting, unforeseen properties.

At some point commerce realizes world + dog uses it and start providing goods
and services -- and the new is thence understood to have supplanted the
incumbent.

Facebook is pretty much the landline phone of late XX century. The market's
ripe for something like the cellphone to disrupt it.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Twitter? Maybe. iCloud? Not a chance. A proprietary service that you can only
access on a limited number of proprietary pieces of hardware (with absolutely
zero transparency) is never going to reach a large mass of users, never-mind
if you attempted to shoe-horn a proprietary social network on top of it.

------
executive
4\. they deleted a bunch of spam accounts

~~~
brianbreslin
i'd bet that 4-5% of ALL accounts on the site are spam/bots/fake profiles.
maybe more. you're talking 20-30 Million accounts at that rate.

------
epynonymous
i believe that the statistics are somewhat inaccurate and therefore
misleading. technically there are multiple things that could skew the results,
none of which necessarily have to do with users not liking facebook or seeking
alternatives, though it makes a catchy title.

1\. a user could register for as many fb accounts as he/she has emails. i
personally have 2 facebook accounts, the reason is because i forgot that i
registered an account, not necessarily because of my alter ego, he's quite
passive and doesn't like fb.

2\. users that pass away

3\. users that move beyond a certain age range

4\. pages that don't represent individuals, like brands or groups, those could
dissolve.

i don't think this data really says much of anything about the facebook
phenomenon other than the fact that there are some adjustments in the total
number of accounts, perhaps for the better as the dirty are purged into
oblivion.

a more interesting statistic would be how much freaking revenue they're
making.

------
troymc
Another possible reason for the decline is that Facebook recently disabled a
bunch of Facebook accounts associated with non-real-life names (e.g. accounts
using Second Life account names).

[http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/05/facebook-deleting-second-
li...](http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/05/facebook-deleting-second-life-avatar-
profiles.html)

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panacea
Just a small data point...

"the most recent hullabaloo over the site's new facial-recognition abilities
is small potatoes compared to controversies of the past"

was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Had an account from before
most people had even heard of Facebook, but deleted mine the other day.

------
Goladus
> Facebook makes some change or introduces a service that appears to make the
> site less private or secure, everybody makes a big deal about it, and
> Facebook (typically) goes ahead and does it anyway. Then everyone starts to
> theorize when users will begin leaving en masse in defiance.

The big deal is from the users who are upset and want to make their opinions
known. I don't think anyone seriously expects a mass defection. What might
happen is a slow erosion of the site's usefulness due to subtle changes in
behavior. Eg people start sanitizing their status updates, making them less
interesting and removing incentive for people to log in. Another example might
be if they are annoyed clunky and restrictive photo sharing tools they start
sharing their pictures somewhere else.

------
pnathan
I dropped out of Facebook about a year ago.Too many privacy intrusions with
"oh, I'm sorry, we'll _never_ do that again" retractions.

What is notable that when I broadcast my quit on FB, only a few % of my
'friends' cared to inquire regarding keeping up contacts. So I felt really
good about quitting: it let me know who cared to keep in contact for real, and
who was linked to me via social obligation.

I miss the content that some people only provide via the FB walled garden (the
notes-posts, not the Wall feed).

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btilly
They claim that increased views/user is a good sign for Facebook because
people tend to slowly ramp down rather than just cutting it off.

I'm not so sure of that. The biggest complaint that I've seen about Facebook
is burnout. In light of that, increased views/user is a sign that they are
encouraging people to do things that will lead to more burnout in the future.

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dlikhten
My 2 cents is that this is a short term trend, if it continues for the next 3
months then I will raise an eyebrow. From people I know I see absolutely no
sign of any decline in facebook interest.

Could be: Summer has come, kids are now hanging out physically more than
virtually which is what happens when you have homework/school (hs -> college)

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programminggeek
It's also summer time and it seems like internet usage dips quite a bit in the
summer. People just spend less time sitting in front of the computer and more
time out doing things. Kids have fewer papers to write so they spend less time
avoiding them on Facebook.

I've seen plenty of seasonal cycles like this in various websites I've managed
in the past. It's not exactly a new thing.

Also FB and Twitter got a lot of press for touting HUGE user numbers, but now
that they are at hundreds of millions of users, they are obviously killing
spam accounts more aggressively. I wouldn't be surprised if as much as 25% of
the users on Facebook or Twitter are spam accounts or bots. At its peak
MySpace was certainly up there in that range.

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nano81
FWIW FB has denied any decline in the US

[http://www.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/view...](http://www.bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/view.bg?articleid=1345293&srvc=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bostonherald%2Fbusiness%2Ftechnology+%28Technology+-+Business+-+BostonHerald.com%29)

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grillz
The thing that made me delete last month was when they reverted the email
notification settings to default.It struck me that they were going to change
things whenever they wanted and I had no power over my information whatsoever.

I can't say this sort of thing caused 6 million others to delete as well, but
as someone who has had a Facebook account since 2004 this was the thing to
finally push me over the edge.

I should add that I don't miss it at all.

