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Facebook monthly visits down 5% in April
- BadassFractal 8y agoRealistically, most people have already forgotten or will really soon.
- bluedino 8y agoIt’s like when people quit going to Chipotle for a few months, but all went back.
- Retric 8y agoShort term hit's still represent huge 'fines' for bad behavior. Chipotle may nominally make very little per customer but their fixed costs stay the same either way so their actual losses are far more significant.
- hyperpape 8y agoChipotle sales are still supposedly down, stock is way down: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/05/07/is-chipotles-turnaround-for-real.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/05/07/is-chipotles-turna... (dunno about the rest of the article, but those claims seem pretty straightforward).
- dominotw 8y agoI think more like #deleteUber . Chiptole wasn't a victim of hashtag drama.
- asfasgasg 8y agoIs this seasonally adjusted, or just raw? Most big internet properties have peaks in the winter and troughs during the summer.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoOnce we see their Q2 results then we might be able to conclude something. Right now using this datasource its almost guesswork.
- ausjke 8y agoOut of how many? 1.3B might be a drop in the bucket for FB.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> 1.3B might be a drop in the bucket for FB Facebook earned $6.18 per user in Q4 of 2017 [1]. That's about $25 per yyear. 1.3bn users thus represent about $32.5 billion of revenues. U.S. and Canadian ARPI was $27.76 for the same period [1]. Let's say 880% of those #DeletingFacebook were from those, or similarly-lucrative, rregions. Blended lost ARPU thus estimates to $23.44 per quarter. Across 1.3bn users, that's $128 billion. Far from a drop in the bucket. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
- maxton 8y agoA monthly visit is not the same as a user. Facebook has ~1.4B daily users, each of whom visits many times a month.
- jwommack 8y agoYou're making the same mistake a lot of people are pointing out in this thread, you're conflating Daily Active Users with Visits. If this were a decline Daily Active Users it'd be a 100% loss, it's clearly not. You'd have to figure out the value per visit to reach a conclusion along the lines you're attempting to make.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> You'd have to figure out the value per visit to reach a conclusion along the lines you're attempting to make Fair enough. One can roughly adjust those figure by dividing by the number of times the average Facebook user visits Facebook each month. This is nothing existential. But it's still, likely, over a billion dollars of lost revenue.
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- beager 8y agoI love me a good Facebook bashing article as much as the next guy, but these numbers have no context to implicate the CA scandal as causative. Is this related to seasonality? Is it outside the bounds of normal fluctuation month-over-month? Is it US-only or international traffic as well?
- bertil 8y agoThe most likely candidate is the change in the News Feed algorithm that was announced months ago, that favoured “friends and family” (and later, local news). It took years to get that change approved, and that can only be because the team looking at it took a lot of time to prove that the positive impact of having that type of content was greater. Facebook announced exactly that type of consequence of the News Feed change in their financial statement, and that estimate was indubitably based on large-scale A/B testing. Source for my intuition: I worked on something very close three years ago (at Facebook). Privacy scandals barely ever register at any company I worked; seemingly minor tweaks to the News Feed could have that compound impact.
- wolco 8y agoIt makes sense but the change happened too late. It was after friends and family stopped posting, liking and sharing for various reasons. Society has changed.
- slg 8y agoThrough very complex math I was able to deduce that April is over 3% shorter than March and February is almost 10% shorter than either January or March. It probably isn't a good idea to base anything off of total visits during time frames that aren't uniform.
- everdev 8y agoA 3-10% drop is huge and much more significant than those deleting Facebook as I'd assume that most of those people used it infrequently if at all and decided the data exposure wasn't worth their minimal use. But when people start using the service less that's significant especially at these higher traffic sites.
- obblekk 8y agoI don't think this data is correct. FB has 1.4B Daily Active Users. 1.4B * 30 days = 42B visits/month. That's a lower bound because many Facebook DAUs visit more than once per day. So the baseline number that this blog cites (~22B visits/month) is almost certainly incorrect. -5% from that baseline might be significant, or it could be sampling bias.
- letier 8y agoI guess the number in the blog doesn't include app usage.
- randomsearch 8y agoDoes anyone have a third party confirmation of that DAU number? I’ve heard informally that this may be inflated.
- lwansbrough 8y agoFacebook has around 1.5 billion DAILY active users. So if we assume a user only visits Facebook once a day (which seems to me like a laughably conservative number), this is about 1 day's worth of visits. Realistically, I'd expect the average user to open Facebook maybe thrice a day, or more. Which means this is roughly ~1% of their monthly traffic. The verdict: nobody gives a shit about their privacy enough to change their habits.
- uhnuhnuhn 8y agoIt says in the article that the drop equals 5.15% of total visits. Please read the article before commenting.
- tracker1 8y agoOnly from the sample... and April has fewer days than March. So it's not that big a difference. Day of the week composition in a month combined with a day shorter month could account for that alone.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoEach user making .5 less visits over 30 days? Alone it's meaningless. We need context. - How was length of visit effected? - What demographic(s)? - One month is not a trend!! Not even two is a trend. You need at least 3 to see a trend. - If the drop was from the previous month, was that month (a typically) up for some reason (e.g., another MSM driven political "controversy") This kind of date / statistics / "analysis" abuse really bother me.
- AznHisoka 8y agothese questions as well as: - is there a seasonality trend? Maybe FB’s trafffic goes down every april (weather warmer perhaps?) - how did the total traffic to all websites change since March? how about to Twitter or Pinterest? We need a benchmark!
- bradgnar 8y agothats legit max one person a month. bfd, nice clickbait.
- alex_young 8y agoAppears to be based on this: https://www.similarweb.com/website/facebook.com https://www.similarweb.com/website/facebook.com Anyone know if it has any statistical significance? I have my doubts just from the presentation.
- brettz 8y agoI use SimilarWeb Pro and compare it to internal analytics and the variances are often incorrect. Also this is website visits only when most FB activity would be on native apps. If you zoom out you can see that Facebook's web traffic has been on the downtrend for awhile https://i.imgur.com/e9Mgjby.png https://i.imgur.com/e9Mgjby.png. Also April has one less day than March which wasn't mentioned.
- AznHisoka 8y agoTheir stats can be incredibly inaccurate. Yes they have perhaps the biggest internet panel, but there are still lots more people who dont install browser plugins (especially those in non-first world countries).
- alex_young 8y agoThanks, that provides some context I missed. It looks like the April drop is mostly expected and unrelated to the CA stuff.
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- russell_h 8y agoSo traffic is down 5% from March to April by these numbers. But there are also 3% less days in April, so that's a lot less significant than it seems.
- nashashmi 8y agoAnd take into account that college kids are studying for exams. That is a significant chunk of Facebook visits.
- randomsearch 8y agoSurely revision means more Facebook use! Assuming procrastination remains at historical levels.
- nashashmi 8y agoFor those like me who don't understand revision, it means review or restudy of material, derivative of revise, or go over again. Depends on how they are studying. If on the computer, then more Facebook. If on textbook, then less.
- chrisco255 8y agoPersonally, I disabled my account. I think it's been healthy. I'm not necessarily a #deletefacebook supporter, but I do think social media gets distracting and sometimes depressing. I don't want it influencing my mood as much. That being said, a good federated, decentralized social network can't come soon enough, in my opinion.
- matte_black 8y agoBegging your pardon, but how is a decentralized social network supposed to be healthier than a centralized one? Isn’t it still going to be full of the same garbage? Isn’t this like quitting cigarettes then getting vaped?
- kuroguro 8y agoIsn't vaping way healthier, less smelly and less of a bother to the people around you? Seems like a decent upgrade.
- matte_black 8y agoHow does that analogy fit back into decentralized social networks?
- kuroguro 8y agoI was trying to say that it's a bad analogy. It seems to contradict what you said earlier.
- matte_black 8y agoI think vaping has been shown to be just as bad for you if not worse.
- kuroguro 8y agoFair enough.
- nevir 8y ago¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- textmode 8y ago[deleted]
- throwawaymath 8y agoYou might want to read the privacy policy for the website you linked before you use it as a rallying cry against Facebook. The irony is pretty amusing.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- SilasX 8y agoYou couldn't add the rest of the title, which mentions that this is 5%? That's a much more relevant figure.
- carrja99 8y agoGood.
- callumjones 8y agoHow is this measured? I think the usage of their mobile apps is significantly greater than visits to "facebook.com", you could argue then that more customers are moving to apps only.
- meritt 8y agoIn my experience, panel-based traffic measurement services (SimilarWeb, Alexa, Hitwise, Quantcast, ComScore, Nielsen) are useless when it comes to reality and their primary role serves to make misleading news articles or convince advertisers to waste a lot of money on overpriced media buys. I'm not the only one with this opinion: https://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-compete-google-trends-quantcast https://moz.com/blog/testing-accuracy-visitor-data-alexa-com...
- rajeshpant 8y agoAnd those people who decided not to visit facebook over Cambridge analytica scandal made 1.5 billion visits on Instagram.
- organicmultiloc 8y agoHeadline is almost as meaningless as COMPANY IPOS AT $20/SHARE
- erobbins 8y agoDemise of Facebook predicted on HN for the 835th time, this might finally be the one.
- zenovision 8y agoSocial networks are boring. 99% of all posts are just attempts to convince other people that you are better than you really are.
- aphextron 8y agoIt's really funny having gotten rid of Facebook years ago, seeing people talk about how they're "trying to cut back" instead of just dropping the dumb thing. It's like listening to drug addicts.
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoAs a personal tool, agreed. Sadly, owning a business it’s pretty much required to deal with Facebook. Unless I want to spend five times as much on traditional advertising for less than half of the results.
- IIAOPSW 8y agoNot trying to discount your experience here but are those the actual numbers? My intuition is that the effectiveness of algorithmic advertising is largely over-stated. I'd really like to see a controlled test of FB ad ROI vs traditional ad ROI.
- GarrisonPrime 8y agoYeah, although I feel I get more response from my Facebook ads than radio and print, I’m usually disappointed how few new customers it creates. However, paying to “boost a post” on Facebook is much better. So much so that I’ve dropped nearly all other advertising. Running an ad can only target so well, as it’s mostly based on plain old demographics. But boosted posts also take into account those who have liked your business page, responded to your prior posts, and who their friends are. At least, that’s the impression my results have been given me. While hard numbers and analysis would be nice to see of course, I have little interest in seeing hard numbers in this case. My proof is that I was able to slash my ad budget by over half, and yet still more than double my business. Over a year later with mostly just Facebook, business is still growing. I’m sure the nature of my business is rather well suited to Facebook though. I’m a sole proprietor offering group entertainment services on a local scale. Im sure the ch companies and other less localized businesses may not get as good results.
- herbst 8y ago
- textmode 8y agohttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-poll/three-quarters-facebook-users-as-active-or-more-since-privacy-scandal-reuters-ipsos-poll-idUSKBN1I7081 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-poll/thr... https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/KimBaraszJohn18_be5ba706-b8c3-4ac4-bb48-3cc462bb0e08.pdf https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/KimBaraszJoh...