Sunday, February 2
Programming Note: I’ll be sending these newsletters on Sunday evenings from now on. But we’re pushing today’s up a bit due to “THE BIG GAME” (6:30 eastern / 3:30 pacific on FOX). So enjoy the Super Bowl, everyone. Though I’m based in San Francisco, I’m picking the Chiefs.
The Blue App Steps Back
A friend of mine who was seeing the same 10-15 friends appear on his Facebook News Feed decided to conduct an experiment. He asked someone to pick ten people from his friend list at random and look at how often they were posting. One by one, he tapped into the profiles — and found ghosts.
“Average post frequency was probably once a year. If that much,” he said. “It was shocking.”
Facebook reported some stunning revenue numbers last week — $21.8 billion in the last three months of 2019 — but once you got past the top line, you saw the real story: Facebook is preparing for its flagship “blue app” to shrink.
Though the app’s daily and monthly active user numbers are still growing, Facebook doesn’t anticipate the trend will continue for much longer. You can see it right in the language. The company said last week that it will stop reporting Facebook-only user numbers in favor of “Family” user numbers in late 2020. This means we’ll see data on the number of people using all Facebook’s apps — Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram — instead of Facebook alone.
When you make these changes, you anticipate that the current framing will make you look bad in the future. Otherwise, why change? So the signal is clear: Facebook’s flagship app is going to shrink in importance, relevance, focus, and (likely) user numbers. At Facebook, the side projects are now the core.
It’s a natural evolution. The company brought social media to the masses by encouraging sharing among friends and family. Then it flooded its News Feed with posts from public figures, news organizations, and random connections (while keeping its users' posts up forever) making people feel queasy about posting publicly and permanently.
Today, Facebook is adapting to people’s desires by going all in on intimate sharing vs. broadcast. The company has the right apps to serve this desire. Smaller, less permanent sharing is moving to Instagram via Stories and its “Close Friends” option. The conversations that once took place on Facebook’s walls are taking place on Messenger and WhatsApp. These will be Facebook’s areas of focus in 2020.
The Facebook app has a promising future: It’s still a key online directory. Its News Feed will stay vibrant thanks to Groups. Stories are starting to look normal there as well. So it won’t go away. But it will be quieter, as my friend’s experiment and Facebook’s language indicates.
My friend suggests trying the experiment yourself and sending me your results. If I get enough, I’ll write them up next week.
For more on this….
In my new book Always Day One, which be released on April 7, 2020, I reveal the inside story of how Facebook transformed from a broadcast social network to a set of smaller, more intimate ones. You can pre-order here: www.alexkantrowitz.com
Peloton’s Big January
