Here’s a sad statistic: Facebook users spend 23 hours of every month browsing the website. That’s 500 million people staring at a computer screen as a social network swallows up 700 billion minutes of their time. Shouldn’t they all get a life?
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.
Facebook suicide is still too bold a move for some. It would be unthinkable for a 16-year-old to kick the habit. Your teenage children might tell you they are “revising” for exams upstairs, but how many hours have they frittered away, sharing hilarious YouTube clips with friends or “poking” each other? For this crowd, Facebook has penetrated every facet of their lives. It is how they communicate (they don’t use email or text messages). It is how they swap articles and videos. As one technology writer put it recently, for them “it’s becoming a web of its own”. Just as Zuckerberg planned.
For others, young twentysomething professionals, for example, it’s a lot easier to quit. My friends use Facebook as a kind of address book, a back-up to their iPhones. At university, we would compulsively check the website because everybody else did. But these days, indifference is catching on. It’s a social epidemic in reverse.
There’s one over-riding reason for this: once you’ve entered the world of work, concerns for privacy become more urgent. That midnight skinny dip at the Majorca beach party was a laugh – but there’s no need to share it with your boss. The dangers of thoughtless social networking apply to all, whether you’re a soldier in Afghanistan, or an over-friendly juror in Manchester.
Facebook is understandably coy about revealing sensitive commercial information such as the average age of those leaving the website. It would rather tell us about its huge growth in places like India, the Philippines and Indonesia – tens of millions of Indians and Filipinos are signing up to Facebook every year.
The problem is, like Western 13-year-olds, they don’t have much buying power. They spend less cash online (Facebook games can be as expensive as online gambling) and are worth less to advertisers, who would rather attract yuppies in Britain and America.
As Adrian Hon, a British technology entrepreneur, told me: “On the surface, Facebook’s losses in the US, UK and Canada are more than balanced out by its rapid growth in emerging markets such as Brazil, India and Mexico. The problem is that a user in a rich country such as the US or UK is far more valuable to advertisers – and to investors – than a user elsewhere. If this trend continues, there’ll be a lot of tense meetings at Facebook HQ.”
Zuckerberg is the sort of Silicon Valley CEO who strolls into meetings wearing flip-flops and shorts. For the moment, he’s unlikely to be bothered by this news.
One report yesterday suggested that Facebook will float in early 2012 – and that it’s looking for a valuation of 100 billion dollars. It’s no wonder Bill Gates is teaming up with Zuckerberg for his latest philanthropic venture. But even Gates might struggle to explain Facebook’s supposed value. Or, for that matter, why LinkedIn (an online business network) is said to be worth $8.5 billion. Or why Groupon (a website that sells coupons offering discounts) is valued at $750 million. None of these companies has revenue that corresponds to those figures. Even Facebook’s total estimated income was only $2 billion last year. Have we learnt nothing from the dotcom crash a decade ago?
A cynical investor would say we haven’t. Websites are being valued by the number of people using them, instead of according to how much money each user brings to the table – as if a wealthy Californian were worth the same financially as an Indian student in a Calcutta internet café.
The spate of “Facebook suicides” in the West should put the fear of God into the smooth executives of Silicon Valley. The tech bubble is impressively large at the moment, but what happens when it pops?
There are two possible scenarios. First, Facebook survives but is vastly reduced in size. The alternative is what gives Mark Zuckerberg nightmares: a new social network appears from nowhere and wipes the floor with its rivals. Sound familiar?
.....I feel good 
