I was quoted in Murad Ahmed’s Facebook may be a ‘passing fad’ as growth in users flattens out article in The Times today as follows:
According to the (comScore) figures, the number of people visiting Facebook on a daily basis is around 14 million, a total that has barely moved since January. On average, British users spent eight hours a month on Facebook, but the growth in numbers of pe
ople using the site appears to be reaching a plateau. “I really do believe that we could be seeing Facebook as a passing fad,” said Richard Holway of TechMarketView.
“I won’t go so far as to say it is going the same way as MySpace,” he added, referring to what was once the world’s leading social networking site before user numbers collapsed. “But there are similarities. Facebook was a medium favoured by young people. Now everybody including me and your grandad is on it.”
As well as the chart from comShare in The Times, Mary Meeker (see my post Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends) had presented a similar chart showing that Facebook was about the only social media site to have reduced its dedicated followers between 2011 and 2012. I have written about my increasingly bearish views about Facebook on many occasions. Most recently in Are you a Facebook Bull or Bear? In April, I visited Hong Kong and in my post Has Facebook lost its ‘cool’? commented that most of the young people using the free WiFi on the Hong Kong MTR on their big screen Samsung smartphones or tablets were not into Facebook – they were mostly using online chat apps like WeChat and iMessage. Or watching videos or playing games. I didn’t see one using Facebook.
I’ve already reported that I haven’t added one new Facebook friend in years. I still use it daily. But mainly to share photos with my family and close friends. There are many other new apps that do this just as well.
I said in The Times that “I won’t go so far as to say it is going the same way as MySpace,” but if I was Zuckerberg or a Facebook investor (which I am not!) I’d be getting pretty worried