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Recent data shows a decline in the number of Facebook users and the time spent by users on the network. (Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg News)
SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook's general manager, Mark Zuckerberg, publicly announced last week his plan to reorient the social network in crisis towards encryption and privacy – turning Facebook from a tumultuous urban venue into an intimate living room, according to the same source. a philosophical essay posted on his Facebook wall.
The test was 3,200 words, but Zuckerberg was able to avoid mentioning how far users had traveled. already 's is far from its place – a reality that can help explain the boldness and urgency of Zuckerberg' s announcement.
A dip in little-known data suggests that Facebook could be in a bigger mess than it is leaving it on. This shows a sharp drop in the time people spend on the main social network.
Recent polls have also revealed a trend towards Facebook removal. A quarter of US Facebook users surveyed by the Pew Research Center last September said they removed the company's application the year before. Edison Research concluded Thursday that Facebook had 15 million less US users that's in 2017.
Facebook's own data tell an even more striking story of the social network's gradual loss of its grip on people's attention.
Several years ago, Facebook created a partnership with the television classification company Nielsen, in which the social network agreed to share a representative monthly sample of its usage statistics and demographic data with the social media company. classification. A subset of these data, covering a two-year period from August 2016 to October 2018, was analyzed in December by Brian Wieser, then securities analyst at Pivotal Research, specializing in Facebook (he is now world president of the strategic watch to the media conglomerate). GroupM).
According to the analysis, Americans have spent much less time on Facebook and Messenger since 2016 – about 10% less per person in a given month compared to the same month of the previous year .
And this is true for all age groups.
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In Fox example, US users over the age of 18 spent 10% less time on Facebook in October 2018 than the same month the year before and 4% less on Facebook than the same month in 2016. In September 2018, 25 to 44 year olds spent 25% less time on Facebook and Messenger than the year before. The same goes for 55 to 64 years old. In some months, people aged 18 to 24 used Facebook more than 30% less than the year before.
These figures represent only a fraction of Facebook users: the company often claims that it has 2.3 billion users worldwide, of which less than 10% in the United States. But most of its revenue comes from services provided to US and European users, those who are gradually moving away. The company's messaging applications, WhatsApp and Messenger, are more popular outside of the United States, but generate virtually no revenue.
In particular, the declines started well before Zuckerberg's last major product change announcement in a January 2018 earnings call to Wall Street, when he said the company would start removing news content from feeds. people to focus more on the content of friends and family. Zuckerberg said the measure would deliberately reduce the amount of time people spend participating in news feeds. But Nielsen's data shows that the declines announced by Zuckerberg on Wall Street have been going on for months.
In this light, last week's Zuckerberg note may be an effort to transform society, but it also resembles damage limitation.
Facebook declined to comment. A company official said that it was too early to speculate on the company's profitability of messaging.
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But there is a potential solution in Zuckerberg's plan for transparent data sharing and communication between the four applications, which he called "interoperability" in his message last week. Interoperability may be an attempt to save Facebook from decadence by giving Messenger and the main platform a boost for the fastest growing businesses: Instagram and WhatsApp. The independent executives of Instagram and WhatsApp, who clashed over the integration of their services to Zuckerberg, both left the company in the past year. They have been replaced by long-time Zuckerberg MPs who are ready to integrate services – and find a way to reduce the revenue from this integration.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, director of the Center for Media and Citizenship of the University of Virginia, hinted that Facebook's decision was not at all related to privacy protection: Zuckerberg did not Never seemed to care much about privacy, Vaidhyanathan wrote in The Guardian last week. to win, and his plan to fully engage in courier services can be seen as an attempt to bring back people who are already leaving in droves.
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