Facebook is King, Other Networks Fight for Scraps

http://blog.naytev.com/facebook-is-king/

by etr71115 • 10 years ago

144 137 10 years ago

blog.naytev.com

larakerns• 10 years ago

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

55555• 10 years ago

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. :-/

petewailes• 10 years ago

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.

haddr• 10 years ago

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 :(

abpavel• 10 years ago

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

CM30• 10 years ago

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/south-korea-cyworld-faceboo...

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.

wodenokoto2• 10 years ago

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.

Raphmedia3• 10 years ago

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.

s3r3nity• 10 years ago

Citation Needed...?

taylorbuley• 10 years ago

Needed but perhaps impossible. An example of the increasing metrics gap between open and closed web. Messaging of various natures seems to be the fastest growing and, in terms of overall transactions, perhaps most popular "social" action yet behind walls it seems the hardest to measure.

Raphmedia3• 10 years ago

Zuckerberg: "coolness is done for us." http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-admits-coolne...

But really, at that point, it's common knowledge. Kids these days are on Instagram and Snapchat. Take a look at this article. It's really light, but it should refresh a bit into how tweens and teens consume social content: http://www.buzzfeed.com/benrosen/how-to-snapchat-like-the-te...

mynegation• 10 years ago

My teen daughter and her friends provide me with all the citation I need. They could not care any less about FB.

fullshark3• 10 years ago

Like Instagram?

cryptoz• 10 years ago

Snapchat, probably.

drawkbox• 10 years ago

Like Instagram

Which is also Facebook.

Then they'll be on Oculus (the OASIS from Ready Player One), also Facebook.

That will continue, Facebook is bigger than just Facebook now.

plaidturtle2• 10 years ago

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.

enjo• 10 years ago

It also seems that as those kids turn from teenagers to 20-somethings the value of Facebook increases markedly. Facebook is optimized for the "we don't see each other every day" type of interactions. Once you've left home and started to leave a geographically dispersed network behind, Facebook looks way more appealing.

bduerst3• 10 years ago

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.

nosuchthing• 10 years ago

Facebook circa 2016 comes up because it's been a ubiquitous hub but that seems to be its fatal flaw. It's lame once you have to be associated with Grandma and the whole UI looks like AOL.

[1] https://31.media.tumblr.com/106e7e5598f02c6017fb6e146dea465f...

renaudg6• 10 years ago

This is a myth : https://recode.net/2016/03/30/are-young-people-leaving-faceb...

bduerst3• 10 years ago

Actually, it isn't. That is a snapshot in time doesn't tell us anything.

If they plotted the growth over time then you would be able to determine if it's a myth or not. In fact, I'm willing to bet that snapchat has gone up and facebook down (y axis) relatively over the last two quarters.

greg___• 10 years ago

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.

artursapek2• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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/

renaudg6• 10 years ago

Even for read operations : forcing you to log in is the only way Facebook has to enforce the non-public privacy setting the content creator may have set.

Conversely, anyone with or without an account can view public Facebook posts.

rpgmaker• 10 years ago

These companies are all supposedly started by hackers who love the internet and technology

I think the word hacker was misappropriated by assholes in Silicon Valley somewhere around the mid-aughts.

kobayashi2• 10 years ago

original ideals of the internet

original ideals of the _World Wide Web_, to be more specific.

sreyaNotfilc• 10 years ago

Pinterest does this as well. Its lame but effective. Supply and Demand is an amazing concept. If FB or Pinterest wasn't as popular/needed then this type of activity would be frowned upon.

ljk• 10 years ago

sadly the "closed garden" concept is the trend these days..

justinzollars• 10 years ago

days? I would say years.

return0• 10 years ago

Growth was crucial in the early days of facebook. They were laser focused on growth, because they knew they had to move fast to destroy all the competition. Now it's retention which is extremely crucial for them. As soon as users start leaking, there is no going back.

RickS• 10 years ago

it's almost as if there is an entire division..., sitting around at Facebook cooking up ways to make me login or install the app

that is exactly correct

dave20003• 10 years ago

Why don't you just create an account for this sort of thing. No baby pictures, no sharing your holiday photos, no commenting on friends/families/colleagues posts. Just accessing groups/sites who use it because it's an extremely cost effective way of getting an internet presence. I used to be just like you but relented in the end because of Facebook messenger (yeah, could use email but people can't generally be bothered with that any more).

vskarine• 10 years ago

The problem is that they force you to use your real identity.

sosborn2• 10 years ago

The problem isn't Facebook. The problem is that the community center decided that maintaining a website wasn't worth the cost and/or the effort.

CodeCube2• 10 years ago

or maybe it's a failure of tech in general that maintaining a website isn't worth the cost and/or the effort ;)

That was a glib remark, but in all seriousness ... for the average non-technical user, who's friends are all on Facebook, their event and group system is a godsend. Non-FB solutions should realize that and figure out ways to make more accessible (and cheap ... aka free) systems

click170• 10 years ago

This.

File a polite complaint that they are excluding members of the community unnecessarily, and that alternatives like meetup.com exist so you don't even need to run your own web server.

specialist• 10 years ago

I help admin a local org's website. We cross post to our site, meetup.com, and our facebook page. Each sucks in its own special way. I wouldn't expect a non-tech to figure this crap out.

forrestthewoods2• 10 years ago

What is the Internet supposed to be mean? Because if the FB site for your community center is able to reach more community members through FB than on their own that's kind of awesome. A free service is making your community a better place!

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC4• 10 years ago

Please stop perpetuating the myth that it's free, it's not.

skewart2• 10 years ago

That's a fair question. I think there is a widely held consensus among most techy people on a set of values/ideas that were instrumental to the birth anf growth of the internet, and which are a core part of what makes it one of the most amazing human inventions ever.

Openness and accessibility are among the most important internet values. Companies that create closed gardens violate these values. Many people believe that this erosion of openness for the sake of short-term profits (2-3 years) will lead to a weaker and all around worse internet in the long run (5-20 years).

The community center people are seduced by the ease of creating a FB site without paying any cash, while likely not realizing that it's harming their community by excluding people.

Of course, being too dogmatic about values is never good. But I would argue this is a case where it's good to stand up for accessibility.

tim3332• 10 years ago

To me the internet is supposed to be an open network to connect computers which means companies like Facebook can do what they want pretty much. I recently did some web presence for a charity and made a regular website, a Wordpress blog, a Facebook page and a subreddit. The Facebook thing got easily the most traffic but I was free to put up any amount of other stuff. I'm not sure trying to change Facebook would really be in the spirit of the open internet.

alistproducer2• 10 years ago

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.

sulam• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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?

godshatter• 10 years ago

I use it. It's a nice place to follow news organizations and argue with complete strangers in the comment sections of the articles they post. Discussions seem to be less quarrelsome, YMMV. The communities are nice for following hobbyist interests. I don't use it at all for following friends or family.

boyce• 10 years ago

It's very popular in particular niches. No serious Ingress player isn't active on G+, for instance.

NoGravitas• 10 years ago

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+.

Analemma_• 10 years ago

Another thing to consider is that social sharing via those buttons just doesn't seem to be "a thing" on Twitter. I'm a heavy (probably excessive) Twitter user, and I interact with a lot of other heavy users, and I almost never see tweets generated by those buttons. IME, when people on Twitter share links it's usually by copy-pasting the URL, and when those Share buttons are used, it's usually by bots or the, er, less technically literate. It's just not part of the culture.

meeper16• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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.

sofaofthedamned• 10 years ago

I love the technology that Facebook make but I hate their day job.

wodenokoto2• 10 years ago

While I do think it is interesting to compare Gmail and Youtube to Facebook, I think you are being down voted for bringing in Android and self driving cars. So is Apple now the big Facebook killer?

nickbauman• 10 years ago

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

acd• 10 years ago

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...

jwblackwell• 10 years ago

Ironically I need to log in to view this

catwell• 10 years ago

Remove Facebook, add WhatsApp.

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0glpjll%2C%20...

Both Instagram and WhatsApp belong to Facebook.

dennisnedry• 10 years ago

Even by your chart, FB is still much higher than the other networks.

dntrkv• 10 years ago

How is it not still king? Your link clearly shows Facebook is still way ahead of any competitors.

prostoalex• 10 years ago

This is based on Google searches. How many users are getting to an app on their phone via a Google search?

okc• 10 years ago

I dont't search for facebook. Its hardwired into my brain.

I would like to think FB has had its day. But globally, and for different age groups, its probably just begun. - Even if it is declining in meaning for the t(w)eens and generally those over-exposed to it.

I cant see any of it developing any further, augmented style or by making it business relevant - these things aren't anywhere as powerful as its basic concept. It is often easier than email to use, so perhaps their is some mileage in a startup that takes a new angle on email - rather than snapchat being the obvious 'next thing'. Its also kinda cool as a news feed of interesting memes, but once again - this could be done better.

FB was always contrary to the ideals of the internet, but thats why people like it; FB imposes a protocol of communication, unlike myspace which was all about being an individual expressing yourself - people seem to like a forced top down order to expression.. (twitter being the ultimate useless expression of this) If FB wants you to log in, its probabaly because everyone on FB prefers it that way. of course, usually everyone is wrong. I would liken FB to the roman empire, it doesnt have any one big downfall, just a gradual decline exploited by various factions of smaller powers.

For the internet, the joy of all of this, is that in the end, freedom, choice, and exchange of information win out. right? right??

brador• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

Like snapchat?

minionslave• 10 years ago

They need a desktop version

xufi• 10 years ago

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

ypeterholmes• 10 years ago

Seems remiss not to include reddit in this analysis no?

danbruc3• 10 years ago

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

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

joering2• 10 years ago

Interesting. What is this based of off?

danbruc3• 10 years ago

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

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

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

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

umeshunni• 10 years ago

Also interesting:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=instagram%2C%20snapc...

chrischen• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

Some would say the network is the product.

skywhopper• 10 years ago

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.

skewart2• 10 years ago

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.

Animats2• 10 years ago

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

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

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...

erikb• 10 years ago

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.

Hoasi• 10 years ago

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

Facebook is King, Other Networks Fight for Scraps

Related Stories