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Report: People Are Spending Much Less Time On Social Media (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNBC: According to a new study from marketing intelligence firm SimilarWeb, people are spending less time on social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The company analyzed Android users' daily time spent on these social networks from January to March 2016 with the same period in 2015, which included data from the U.S., UK, Germany, Spain, Australia, India, South Africa, Brazil and Spain. Instagram usage was down 23.7 percent this year, Twitter usage was down 23.4 percent, Snapchat usage was down 15.7 percent, and Facebook usage was down 8 percent. Daily usage was down even more in the U.S. for most of the apps. In the U.S., Instagram usage was down 36.2 percent, Twitter was down 27.9 percent, Snapchat was down 19.2 percent but Facebook only fell 6.7 percent. Current installs for the four big social networks were down nine percent year over year. Meanwhile, Facebook's messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger increased their installs by 15 percent and 2 percent respectively.
Burned by data costs, not playing anymore.
Gritty.
This has nothing to do with the FUD that's being spread about alleged privacy invasions. It's more likely that the change in how stories are presented in news feeds and, in some cases, the amount of spam drive down the amount of time people spend on social media. Also, after awhile, the appeal of social media networks, like anything else, will wear off. People just aren't as interested in using social media now than they were.
As far as I know, group chat does not need privacy options and there is no adverts anywhere to be seen.
Privacy is a bitch, with HHRR matching public Facebook profiles to CVs. Nobody wants to try to keep up with the latest tweaks to the policy settings.
Adverts also take a considerable portion of the screen, something you do not have on a mobile phone. Aand to make things worse, FB introduced a new policy of not showing all of your posts to your followers. Now, if you are a paying customer, that is another story.
I have not hear if any IM application that has these two issues. Well, many apps might share instantaneous information like location, but not your posts with strangers.
I never got into it, but I do know a bunch of people who poured way more than a healthy amount of time into World of Warcraft when it was cool in the late 2000s. Granted, there's still a whole cadre of totally hardcore players out there, but that number is way down. Not surprisingly the same thing is happening with social media - people are getting tired of the new toy and want their lives back. I think more people realize they're being tracked and advertised to, the useful-to-crap ratio is going down, and maybe just maybe people are getting tired of staring at their phones all day long. So kind of like WoW...lots of people figured out there was little point to keep grinding and leveling up characters in a world that doesn't really exist.
I don't really want to see Dotcom Bubble 2.0 bust the same way 1.0 did, but I do feel it's getting toward that time. I just hope it'll go slower and not take so much of a toll. Hopefully it'll happen soon and some of the idiotic unicorn VC money can get poured into something useful that isn't just "X service on your phone" instead. Not looking forward to the "AngularJS Engineers" and "Cloud Infrastructure Architects" who will no doubt be flooding the job marketing like the "HTML Programmers" did last time.