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It's starting to look like Facebook is |
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becoming played out. |
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Released on Tuesday, November 7, 2011, 8:00 PM ET
Pittsburgh, PA (SpeculatingStocks) - It’s starting to look like Facebook is becoming played out. Sure, Facebook is still hot, but Facebook appears to have reached its peak -- in terms of traffic and interest in Facebook.com.
Facebook may have reached its peak traffic back in mid-August. Since then Facebook’s reach has dropped and now their reach is sideways, not recovering. Pageviews for Facebook have dropped off precipitously and so has time spent on the social network. It’s seriously questionable whether Facebook will catch Google in terms of reach, though at one point it looked inevitable that Google would be caught.
People are growing weary of the Facebook brand and there is no longer an “aura” around it. It’s just something that people put up with as a part of their life now, something they need rather than something that they are excited about. This is where Facebook falls short of a company like Apple.
Facebook is seeing increased competition from micro-social networks that are focused on one topic. This type of competition will continue to chew into the time that people allot to Facebook.
Owners of Facebook shares have begun auctioning off some of their shares on SecondMarket’s website. Probably starting to feel shaky on whether their Facebook shares will provide further return from the huge growth Facebook shares have already seen on SecondMarket. Auctions for Facebook shares have been held 43 times on SecondMarket’s website. The most recent Facebook share auction failed, not a single buyer showed up to bid for Facebook at the advertised price of $33.91 per share.
Facebook won’t go anywhere, but they are at a serious risk of becoming the next Yahoo. Remember, Yahoo! also had a huge user base, extreme popularity, and yet still slowly drifted into mediocrity.
Social media is here to stay, but it is becoming ubiquitous and no one entity will control social media.
Facebook isn’t played out in terms of monetizing its massive user base, but its user base won’t grow much further and it looks like their user base could start shrinking, certainly their traffic metrics are.
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