Is Facebook dead?
When you have a market with one really dominant player, there are always people keen to grumble and knock it. And there are definitely always people keen to predict it’s demise.
There are always bright new shiny things emerging that people will tell you will be the slayer of the major player.
The same is true in the social media world and that major player, by a country mile is Facebook. Obviously Twitter and Pinterest will claim to have a significant stake in the social media market but they really don’t come close to Facebook’s global penetration.
That is despite recent reports showing that visitor and user figures are down in some markets.
Take the US for example. In March 2012, Facebook had 153 million visitors. That number dropped by 11 million this March. Figures in the UK are little down too. But may be that’s result of a maturing market. The UK and the US were the early adopters of Facebook.
Globally their monthly active users i.e. those who have used Facebook in the last month grew to a massive 1.11 billion. That is huge rise and a huge figure.
It’s true –
- There have indeed been knockers – especially over Facebook’s privacy policies.
- There have been new entrants with an eye on the big prize. Witness Pheed. But that seems to be the play thing of the cool and trendy on the West Coast of the US and Paris Hilton’s entourage of lovies.
None of which will worry Facebook too much. Because a year ago their big threat was mobile and how to get revenue from mobile. A year back, mobile ad revenue was virtually zero.
Facebook’s latest revenue figures show that in Q1 2013 ads delivered $1.25 billion worth of revenue and mobile ad revenue accounted for 30% of that figure. So they are getting mobile right.
Zuckerberg has made it pretty clear that the future lies in mobile. He knows that a mobile user will visit the site far more often than a desktop user. And again here he appears to be winning that battle. The number of active monthly mobile users is up 54% in this period compared to the same period in 2012.
It’s not all rosy in the Facebook garden though. He still needs to battle rising operating costs, new (ish) entrants like WhatsApp and the naysayers but for the time being and for the foreseeable time being – Facebook remains the king of the social media jungle leaving the others thinking “they could’ve been a contender”.