Facebook popularity on the decrease

Facebook’s speedy growth looks set for an equally fast decline, particularly amongst the younger market.

Recent analysis suggests that by 2017 Facebook will be past it, losing 80% of its users in the next three years. Analysts have compared the growth curve of Facebook to other social networking rivals, such as MySpace and Bebo and concluded that Facebook has already peaked and user numbers look set to continue dropping.

Facebook has been around for ten years, longer than other social media sites, however due to factors such as young people preferring not to share social media sites with their parents, its decline appears unavoidable.

In October 2013 Facebook had nearly 1.2 billion active users; updated figures are due to be released at the end of this month.

Analysis of traffic to the site uses Google trends as a guide; however since the surge in popularity in smartphones, many phone users do not use the search engine to find the page, so figures cannot be exact. Although David Ebersman, chief financial officer at Facebook, has admitted to a drop in users.

The analysts have compared figures based on an ‘infectious disease’ analysis, claiming “Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out … ideas are spread through communicative contact between different people who share ideas with each other. Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of ‘immunity’ to the idea.”