Is Facebook the Biggest Waste of Time?
It would appear that the average user spends 4 hours and 39 minutes a month (based on June 2009’s statistics) on Facebook, which is the highest of any of the top ten online brands.
This is all according to the most recent Nielsen report and has been digested and commented on by those reliable chaps at Mashable.
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Facebook losing money ?!
Today to my astonishment I read that facebook, commonly recognised as the biggest and most successful social media website in the world is currently running at a loss and has not yet generated a profit in any financial year since launch. What I think makes this even more astounding are some of the facebook statistics which they actively promote via their own website -
- More than 200 million active users worldwide
- More than 100 million users log on to facebook at least once each day
- More than two-thirds of facebook users are outside of education
- The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
With this kind of consumer audience and what seems to be a fairly cost effective and simple advertising model, what is going wrong? Is too much time being spent on developing clever functionality and not enough focus being put into generating revenues?
If we are to believe what is reported, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg isn’t interested in making money, it’s more about connecting people (which I think is easy to say when you reported to be worth over $1.5 billion!!) but with his personal fortune depleting at a rapid rate, will his focus change?
In a recent interview the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones speaks to facebook Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg about facebook revenues, piracy and what the future holds.
Facebook losing money interview
However much Sheryl claims that it’s all part of their global plan, in my opinion facebook needs to get its business model in order before they miss the boat, in case they haven’t heard, Twitter has arrived!
Twitter: here today gone tomorrow?
From Barack Obama to Paris Hilton everyone is at it, Twitter has taken the digital world by storm, the human urge to know what other people are doing is fuelling the growth of the website (we are a nosy bunch!) but does it have a long term future?
A recent Nielson report called ‘Twitters or Quitters’ identifies that while the uptake in new Twitter accounts is monumental the drop out rate of users beyond the first month of usage is around 60%, on this basis the future may well look bleak unless Twitter are able to reduce this number considerably, getting members = no problem, keeping them = problem!
So why is it that so many people join the Twitter bandwagon and then decide it isn’t for them after just 30 days? Well we’ve got our thinking hats on in the office and come up with a few thoughts as to why this might be:
Facebook or Twitter – I think a great deal of web users are weighing up whether to dedicate their ‘web time’ to either facebook or twitter, which each vying for a large proportion of our time we feel that the majority of standard web users are making a choice of one or the other, and Facebook with it’s extensive functionality seems to be winning the way, albeit they are very different websites with different pro’s and con’s, but that’s another post!
Too much work – To begin with, twitter is great, you search and follow people with similar interests/views and can pleasure in reading their thoughts and what they are up to (the nosey side of us again!) However, very quickly as the numbers of followers and following increase, managing your twitter account can become a very time consuming and arduous task, there are a number of tools on the interner designed to help you manage your twitter account, Tweetdeck is one of them, a great app to help you organise your tweets, replies and direct messages, there are litterally hundreds more a selection of which can be found here.
Boredom – Ultimately everything has its shelf life and whilst knowing the ins and outs of everyones business is attractive to a lot of people it soon wears thin. Unless people have an underlying reason to use twitter i.e. personal gain, brand building/management for businesses I believe that their interest in twitter will quickly dwindle, not coming close to the long term attractiveness of sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.