The big question mark in my mind is if Facebook can monetize the new Facebook Federation fast enough to counter the eventual decline of Facebook, the social network.
To be clear, as the network approaches 1.5 billion active users, it’s not going away any time soon. But I’d bet on a slow decline of the main product starting sooner rather than later. (Who knows if they’ll ever admit this though since Messenger users are technically Facebook users and many people I know have Facebook open on their desktops just to use Messenger.)
MG did a good job avoiding the tiresome claim that Facebook the company would die, but did decide to vaguely predict the peak of Facebook, the social network.
Is Facebook diversifying and splitting up the Social Network a bit? Yes. Has Facebook, the Social Network, peaked? Not based on anything objective that I can think of – total users, daily active users and money per user.
The numbers tell a much different story than MG’s gut feeling. Daily Average Users continues to grow, dollars per user also continues to grow and at an impressive rate. Although there are 1.5 billion people on the network already there are nearly 3 billion people with access to internet. There are also 4.2 billion people without access to the internet, which Internet.org is attempting to address. There are plenty of people that Facebook can go after to grow the network. Law of Large numbers be damned.
Perhaps MG has experienced Facebook fatigue, his usage of the Social Network may have peaked but the numbers do not indicate it’s peaked for the rest of the world.
Based on the post, it appears MG feels Facebook’s diversification is what signals to him the Social Network has peaked. Google and Amazon have also similarly diversified but I believe their cash cows – Google.com and Amazon.com are far from their peak.
The Social Network will evolve but I believe it’s far from it’s peak.
Disclaimer – I own $FB, $GOOG and $AMZN