Perhaps a little premature, this idea that the end of Facebook is nigh, but certainly the end of the beginning.
The bad news for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 27-year-old billionaire creator, is that many people are doing just that. They’re using Facebook less, or leaving it altogether – which is known, would you believe it, as “Facebook suicide”.Figures show that 100,000 British users deactivated their accounts during May, reducing the total number to 29.8 million. And six million logged off for good in the United States. What started off as an exclusive online social club at Harvard University has saturated Western society. Now it could be on the way down.
The thing with being rated as a hot growth stock is that when the growth starts to slow you’re rated as an ex-hot growth stock.
Facebook is still growing very fast in terms of page views and number of users. But as these new figures show, there does seem to be some sort of limit to that growth. And it’s not the number of people on the planet nor the number of hours in the day which is that limit. There really are people who have tried it, tasted it, and gone, umm, no, I don’t want that thanks very much.
Which is almost exactly what Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and the various shareholders wouldn’t like people to be finding out as they prepare for next year’s mooted IPO. For everyone would like to IPO when still rated as a hot growth stock.
There’s a larger issue to, as Felix Salmon has pointed out. Yes, certainly, there really was a Google that came out of the dot com boom. And an Amazon, an e-Bay. But to value every company as if they are the next Google, rather than valuing them all as if one of them might be, is pretty much the definition of a bubble.
And in the social media space perhaps even more so. For we’ve had a number of companies that were that new Google over the years. Bebo, Friends Reunited, MySpace: all killed by Facebook (or all killed by the one that came after them, Facebook just being the latest).
Who really is willing to bet: well, OK, quite a lot of people actually, but who ought to be willing to bet that there’s no one about to come up behind Facebook and do the same all over again?