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Wishful thinking. Facebook may be struggling in 2020, but they certainly won’t be dead. I’d wager they’ll still have more than a billion DAU. Edit: do you have

Wishful thinking. Facebook may be struggling in 2020, but they certainly won’t be dead. I’d wager they’ll still have more than a billion DAU. Edit: do you have an explanation for why this graph has been cratering for years while Facebook’s MAU and DAU have continued to climb? Also, see Youtube’s search trend. Pretty sure it hasn’t been dying for years now. This just isn’t a good signal, sorry.

danbruc 9y ago
My best guess is that the active user numbers are not representative. Once you have an Facebook account checking once a day if something interesting happened or sending a few messages makes you an active user, I guess, but in my book that does not mean you are really using Facebook. I still visit Facebook almost every day, mostly to chat with friends, even though my feed has mostly become an uninteresting desert years ago and I rarely - less than once a month - post, comment or like something. So if I am not an exception, then looking at the number of users posting or commenting on any given day might vastly differ from the number of active users but I admittedly don't know how exactly Facebook defines those. And if you look at the search traffic for MySpace, Google+, or the German StudiVZ and MeinVZ [1] it certainly tracked the rise and fall pretty exactly. Finally the YouTube search traffic is essentially flat for me since 2012 besides a step at the beginning of 2016 due to changed data collection methods. [1] https://i.imgur.com/SGci58n.png https://i.imgur.com/SGci58n.png
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  Ah, I see. So in this case, “dead” means billions of people who login multiple times per week and the accompanying tens of billions in ad revenue. May we all have startups that suffer such a fate. Seriously though, I’m not sure what your point even is. Facebook doesn’t care about how often you login or why, as long as ad revenue keeps flowing. And those numbers have grown like crazy over the period where you say their search traffic (and thus their userbase) has been cratering. I just don’t see it. Every meaningful metric for Facebook that you can find for the period in question points to the search trend not being a reliable predictor. Also, my point with YouTube is that their search trend has been flat or declining since 2012, but YouTube as a platform has been anything but over that time period. Not a useful signal.

danbruc 9y ago

My best guess is that the active user numbers are not representative. Once you have an Facebook account checking once a day if something interesting happened or sending a few messages makes you an active user, I guess, but in my book that does not mean you are really using Facebook. I still visit Facebook almost every day, mostly to chat with friends, even though my feed has mostly become an uninteresting desert years ago and I rarely - less than once a month - post, comment or like something. So if I am not an exception, then looking at the number of users posting or commenting on any given day might vastly differ from the number of active users but I admittedly don't know how exactly Facebook defines those. And if you look at the search traffic for MySpace, Google+, or the German StudiVZ and MeinVZ [1] it certainly tracked the rise and fall pretty exactly. Finally the YouTube search traffic is essentially flat for me since 2012 besides a step at the beginning of 2016 due to changed data collection methods. [1] https://i.imgur.com/SGci58n.png https://i.imgur.com/SGci58n.png

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
Ah, I see. So in this case, “dead” means billions of people who login multiple times per week and the accompanying tens of billions in ad revenue. May we all have startups that suffer such a fate. Seriously though, I’m not sure what your point even is. Facebook doesn’t care about how often you login or why, as long as ad revenue keeps flowing. And those numbers have grown like crazy over the period where you say their search traffic (and thus their userbase) has been cratering. I just don’t see it. Every meaningful metric for Facebook that you can find for the period in question points to the search trend not being a reliable predictor. Also, my point with YouTube is that their search trend has been flat or declining since 2012, but YouTube as a platform has been anything but over that time period. Not a useful signal.