In this wide world of the Internet, you’ll often hear about the impending demise of Facebook. It’s not as cool as it used to be, the social media market is more competitive now, young people aren’t flocking to it as much, its IPO tanked, etc. etc. etc.
But let me denounce the naysayers: Facebook isn’t going anywhere.
People have been promising for years that Facebook’s days are numbered although its number of users has always been on a constant climb (topping 1.1 billion in March). But beyond that data point, I predict Facebook will stay king of the virtual community hill for a long time.
Based on comparative data I collected from Alexa, I’ve assembled user traffic highlights of the top 10 websites in the United States into a convenient table below. For emphasis, I’ve bolded those where a website comes in first.
|
US rank |
Global rank |
Bounce rate |
Daily page views |
Time on site |
|
|
|
1 |
1 |
17.80% |
17.78 |
15:25 |
|
|
2 |
2 |
17.90% |
16.65 |
34:48 |
|
YouTube |
3 |
3 |
25.10% |
13.66 |
23:34 |
|
Yahoo! |
4 |
4 |
28.10% |
6.31 |
8:42 |
|
Amazon |
5 |
6 |
47.80% |
6.43 |
5:18 |
|
|
6 |
12 |
29.80% |
8.53 |
7:23 |
|
Wikipedia |
7 |
7 |
53.10% |
3.72 |
4:36 |
|
eBay |
8 |
21 |
22.00% |
13.86 |
12:13 |
|
|
9 |
11 |
31.10% |
5.82 |
10:42 |
|
Craiglist |
10 |
40 |
12.20% |
21.12 |
15:20 |
Note: these numbers are always in flux; I collected them on 9/5/2013.
Craigslist does remarkably well in page views and bounce rate – what a person does on their very next click after coming to your site. If everyone’s next click is to another site, they “bounce.” But Craiglist is really about connecting people in their home towns, not creating virtual, worldwide communities (as we can see from its relatively low global rank).
While Google is No. 1 for US and global rank, Facebook takes the award for time on site and buries it (even beating YouTube!) – which is the most important data point for user engagement.
But for me the most telling data about Facebook’s longevity is the info about its demographic variance. Red means below average, green means above average, and the longer the bar, the more above or below average the percentage of users. 
Note how closely Facebook slices everything: gender, all levels of education, and browsing location. And in terms of age: some insist that because grandma is on Facebook now, kids are leaving it (especially for Instagram which Facebook, uh, bought) – but kids aren’t the only people on the Internet. And I would be more concerned about a website’s future if its users were mostly fickle teenagers rather than the 30-plus crowd.
Compare this to Pinterest, which seems to be used by mostly by teenage girls at school:
Or LinkedIn:
Or Reddit, which is increasingly popular and seems to be the only social media used more by males than females:
Or Twitter, which does almost as well as Facebook methinks:
Now Google does really well in terms of appealing to all demographics:
So the conclusion to jump to is that if anyone could take out Facebook, it would be Google, right? Wrong. In a recent report on social media usage, Google-Plus – regardless of whatever merits it may have – got beaten by LinkedIn and even “Other”! (Google-Plus would lose a student election to “Bart Simpson” and “This school sucks.”)
As the adage says, “What goes up, must come down.” So yes of course there will be a time in the future when Facebook will not dominate the web. There will also be a time when people will browse the Internet from cities on the moon.
I’m not sure which will come first.
