• by Andy Oakes  @andyoakes, January 31, 2014

It seems I’m trapped in some sort of column writers Groundhog Day. Having been away for a lot of last week I spent the weekend scanning the usual blogs and sites to see what has been going on in the wonderful world of digital. What I read caused me to curse my post-conference session wine intake as I thought I was reading stories from the middle of last year. So it seems Facebook is over. Again. Like the way flood warnings used to crop up once every two years in the UK, we now get them on a daily basis. There is no new news.

However, this headline had a particular catchy headline. According to US scientists, Facebook will lose 80% of users in three years before eventually dying out ‘like the bubonic plague’. I read on to find which tin pot institution was coming out with this hyperbole, imagining that somebody operating out of a back room in South Dakota might be responsible. But no, this came out of Princeton University. These guys aren’t dumb and I’m fairly certain they could take me in a pub quiz but this struck me as ridiculous. 

Further reading of the study only enhanced my sense that I’d spent longer away than I had intended and it was now April 1^st. The methodology was based on the number of times that Facebook is typed into Google. Imagine the delight on our Princeton chums faces when they discovered that Facebook searches reached a peak in December 2012 and have now begun to decrease. Couple this with the rash of ‘Teens desert Facebook’ articles from last year (and, yes, I know I wrote at least three of them) and it looks like Mark Zuckerberg probably needs to start smartening up his CV and wondering if he should start shopping at Lidl. 

Except they did seem to have missed the advent of the app. They seem to have missed the fact that pretty much every smartphone comes with Facebook preloaded. Oh, and that tablets happened.

And then what the Princeton Two must have thought was the killer blow. They decided to compare Facebook to MySpace. Now I’m starting to wonder about the pub quiz. That’s the same MySpace that peaked in 2008? The same MySpace that had no mobile application, that peaked after iPhones became prevalent (the iPhone launched in the UK on 2007) and that had pretty much hit its downward spiral before the iPad launched in 2010?

I had a chat with some media agency chums of mine. They, too, couldn’t believe I was going to write this column again. “It’s different this time” I pleaded, “these guys are from Princeton. They must be on to something.” From the dismissive snorts on the end of the phone, it seemed not. A few things came out. Facebook is still the second-biggest site in the world. One point two billion monthly users still sells a lot of ads. And whisper it quietly, Facebook might not be that worried about losing teen share. After all, they are still growing in the more mature — and more affluent — demographics. It’s a mass market tool now and mass can still mean good things in media.

Lastly, rather like bookies, investors tend to be a good barometer of a situation. A quick scan of the FT reveals that Facebook’s share price reached a record level earlier this month, meaning that the company was now valued at a mere £85 billion. That should be enough to fund a little R+D work to make sure they keep the users happy.

Now, I’m a mere graduate of Bournemouth University but on this occasion I’m pretty sure that Princeton got this wrong and that the media agencies and the City have it right. And I will take anybody on in a pub quiz.