Commentary
Timesuck: The Battle For Our Leisure Time (And Money)
- by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, July 15, 2010
Timesuck. That's what a friend of mine from high school calls Facebook. He is right. Putting aside for the moment any negative connotations that the term might engender, it's certainly an apt description when you look at the facts. Facebook's hundreds of millions of users spend an astounding amount of time scrolling through its pages, posting comments & photos, "liking" things, sending messages and, of course, playing social games like Zynga's Farmville, Fishville and Mafia Wars. Although their offerings are clearly more focused on singular tasks, the same could also apply to a number of other popular social Web services for consumers, from Twitter to Foursquare.
Many folks in the media industry look at Facebook and think that they are only seeing a short-lived, youth-based social communications phenomenon -- maybe the CB radio of the 21st Century -- not a revolution in the entertainment industry. They are wrong. I believe that Facebook and other social Web services are going to dramatically change the landscape -- and economics -- of the media and entertainment industries. Here's why:
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Enormous reach and engagement. The numbers say it all. Facebook has hundreds of millions of members (many inactive, but enough active to constitute a massive audience) and, according to Nielsen, those in the U.S. spent an incredible 13.9 billion minutes per month on the site in the middle of last year.
Middle America is onboard. I grew up in small coal town in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. My high school classmates are all over Facebook, and Zynga. This is not a coastal or newbie fad. Social web services are now mainstream. When it was first introduced, Facebook was all about high school and college students, but now it captures nearly every demographic -- and in sizeable numbers.
Time is money. Today, the amount of money that consumers and advertisers spend on social Web services is quite small relative to the broad media and entertainment industries; only a few billion dollars, probably. However, the time that they are spending on Facebook is time that they are not deeply engaged in other leisure activities that they or advertisers used to pay for.
User engagement and attention. Facebook and other social Web services are not passive "background" media, like radio. When people are using Facebook, they are very engaged with it and are constantly interacting with others. It owns their attention (unless of course they are teenagers, then four or five things can own their attention at a given moment). The time they spend there is time that they could be spending with many other types of paid media, but are not.
Can Facebook make other media better? I don't believe that Facebook and other social Web services are in a battle to the death for the hearts and minds of leisure and entertainment consumers. No, actually I believe that those media that "get it" will find social media services to be enormous catalysts and platforms for future growth.
Just look at television. Facebook and Twitter are already having a significant positive impact on the ratings of television shows, enabling friends to tell each other about shows they like and are watching. It is truly the new "water cooler" for the industry, and many companies in the space are adopting it.
What do you think? Is todays's Timesuck the Warner Brothers, CBS or American Telephone & Telegraph of tomorrow?
Dave: You're right on about the 'structural' effects of Facebook. So far, however, I have seen little evidence that advertisers have figure out how to leverage this activity. I think the first problem to solve is defining just 'what' the 'activity' is. I see a lot of burn-out among facebook users, abandoned pages, pages that haven't been updated in months or sometimes years. I find most of the "engagement" effort to be annoying, misleading, too-clever-by-half, or just mind numbingly stupid. Granted -there's a large 'lonely guy/gal' factor with people putting a lamp in the window and hoping someone will call. That said, it sill has the potential to move from undirected graph to directed graph. I just haven't seen anyone figure out 'how.'
Your battery card was a perfect 'directed' link to you. It connected you to Radio Shack in a way in which you controlled the direction, and were rewarded each time you found another reason to let RS "re charge" the relationship. Online (or social network) advertisers haven't figure out how to do this yet, because the have figured out what the 'energy' is that drives the link. The answer, btw, is anything that helps the person without obligation. This is different than a coupon or a gift, This is a 'useful' object. It could be information, but it must be define by the consumer's need and not the 'sellers' need. In time, I think we will find that services like Evernote, Dropbox, Delicious, and so on, will be the better mousetrap. They save me time, effort, I trust them, because they let let me do something that is important to me, with little or no keening plea to buy something. dh
"Everybody goes where everybody goes." Now what ? Then what ? Will one have enough ability to do things they want to do in communities (humans are tribal) and find out things we need to find out about - OK simplistic - without FB and other TS on line social and anti-social behaviors (hermitizing) ?
Agree. Facebook is real. No CB radio. But the time suck question is also legit. We (humans) always find a way to use the most legitimate and effective developments to fritter away our lives. If there is meaningless and empty activity that we can do to avoid things meaningful, we'll find it.
Good article. Two comments to two of your points:
* Middle America- I couldn't agree more. Some friends of mine (also from rural PA) who a year or two ago were scarcely online, are now spending HOURS on Facebook.
* Make Other Media Better- I hear so much about how Social Media (like "Viral Videos" a few years ago) can be a cheap way of advertising and marketing, or that it will replace other traditional marketing channels. That misses the point. If done right, it's not necessarily free or even cheap, because it requires time from the brand to be part of the conversation. However it can make other elements of your marketing, PR and consumer engagement mix far more effective.
David .. I fully agree. Someone is going to turn the "undirected" graph into a "directed" one and drive a lot of business for their clients, and create a lot of competition in their wake.
BTW... just saw the blurb on TVE (TV Everwhere), the cable service that allows cable subscribers to view their "cable content" free - over the web (mobile, netbook, etc). Reportedly, this will evolve into a tiered service with a pay-tier (some stuff free, other paid). This is an example of a conversion from undirected to directed. Cable is structuring the deal so that "underlying behavior" is 'fee' (in this case, it's an extension of the cable service the consumer is already paying for), but uses that may prove to be uniquely valuable to the "out-of-home" viewer will be paid. We can only speculate what "such" content might be, but it will emerge once the capability is widespread enough for patterns to become significant.
There is no "social network" until it emerges from social behavior. We don't need to "invent" them. Social interaction is the normal state (condition). Some of those interactions are more useful or satisfying, and behavior is developed to repeat those interactions more often (just as other behavior is developed to avoid less useful or pleasant interactions). When technology is invented that facilitate the preferred behavior, you get 'innovation.' Facebook and the like will succeed (as media) when they learn how to cull the behaviors for those that are "useful" and/or "satisfying" and then -enable them in someway that produces favorable experiences less arbitrarily. That, they can monetize.