Facebook in Decline
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Jul 22, 2010
Once you become the second most visited site on the Internet, there’s almost nowhere to go but down. Maybe not this year, maybe not next, but eventually users will tire of Facebook and move on. In an audience poll at the conclusion of the 2009 Gartner CRM Summit, both the audience and the analysts expected Facebook to have fewer than 250 million users in ten years (it has 500 million as of this week).
Social networks are resilient, and benefit from network effects, such as Briscoe’s Law. Briscoe’s Law, a refudiation (sorry) of Metcalfe’s Law, says that the value of a network grows at N*log(N). The more members, the more valuable the network. So it seems foolish to think that social networks will stagnate or decay, right?
Here are three once-paramount networks that have declined and repurposed themselves:
- MySpace, founded in 2003, was once the largest social networking site, prompting its purchase by News Corporation for $580 million in 2005. Today it emphasizes connecting users to music, videos and games. It remains one of the most popular U.S. sites, ranked #13 by Alexa, even though its daily reach has dropped from 8% of Internet users in 2008 to 3% today.
- Friendster, founded in 2002, was one of the first social networking sites. It has dropped to #1,268 in rank in the United States, but it is #8 in the Philippines and does well in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea.
- Livejournal, founded in 1999 by a teenager, was an early blogging site where users’ built networks of their friends’ blogs. It remains the 102nd most visited U.S. site, according to Alexa, and has risen to the #8 site in Russia. But it lacks the visibility it once had, and was spun off by Six Apart (publishers of TypePad) to Russian owners.
Social networking sites may have network effects on their side, but they can become seriously uncool. Facebook may devolve into a photo-sharing site, a news aggregator or the #1 social network for girls in the Niagara Falls area. It’s less likely to be supplanted by LinkedIn or Twitter than it is to be made passé and uninteresting by some new site a teenager is creating this summer.