Is the social media era really ending?
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Table of contents
Indicators: Charts and prediction markets about social media.
Forecast: Will Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, & Snapchat have more or fewer combined users in February?
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Elon Musk is blowing up Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg is pivoting to the metaverse, power users are fleeing their platforms, and seemingly every tech company is laying people off. Columnists are marking the end of an era. “The age of social media is ending,” Ian Bogost wrote in The Atlantic . His colleague Derek Thompson says “We’ve mostly passed through the browser era, the social-media era, and the smartphone-app-economy era” and are entering the AI era.
But is the social media era really ending? That could mean a lot of things, but one of them is that the legacy social media apps—Facebook, Twitter, etc.—will decline.
The real value of forecasting is its ability to make our thinking more explicit, as Michael Page, the former head of Georgetown’s Foretell forecasting platform, put it to me recently. And that’s what I want to do here. Do we really think the major social media apps are going to decline?
This week’s forecast looks at the total global daily Android users (for data availability reasons) for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat combined. Will that number rise or fall over the next few months?
Background
Twitter has reportedly been losing its power users since the pandemic. The number of “heavy tweeters” who tweet at least three times a week has been declining and hundreds of thousands of users have deactivated their accounts since Musk took over. Hundreds of employees have resigned following the layoffs and a Musk ultimatum. The World Cup, which will take place from late Nov. through mid-Dec., historically drives lots of users to Twitter.
Facebook’s daily active users fell for the first time ever in the fourth quarter of 2021 but have grown modestly since . Mark Zuckerberg is spending billions to reposition Meta as a “metaverse” or virtual-reality focused company.
Snap laid off 20% of its staff in August , as the threat of recession hurt the ad market. Meta laid off 13% of its staff in November . And Musk laid off half of Twitter last month.
Privacy changes by Apple has hurt the advertising businesses of social media companies. The smartphone maker made it harder for an app to share data with third parties, including advertisers.
Social media companies face new competitors. TikTok, the short-video app, is by far the biggest threat —though its regulatory status in the US is uncertain . And there are always new entrants: BeReal is the app of the moment ; here’s a list from last year.
Perspectives
“If Twitter does fail, either because its revenue collapses or because the massive debt that Musk’s deal imposes crushes it, the result could help accelerate social media’s decline more generally.” —Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, Nov. 10
“For years, most of the conversation about social media companies was about how powerful and dominant they were. These days? Not so much… the industry increasingly feels as if it’s having an identity crisis… Meta’s cash-cow social media apps — Facebook and Instagram — are in decline, with younger users abandoning them for apps like TikTok.” —Kevin Roose, New York Times, Oct. 26
“Unlike Facebook, Instagram still has a strong hold on young people. Around 7 out of 10 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 use the platform, according to a Pew Research Center survey last year… But Instagram is worried that young users may not stick around. The 2021 Piper Sandler survey, for example, found that Instagram was the third most popular social network among teens, with Snapchat number one and TikTok at number two.” —Sarah Todd, Quartz, Aug. 2
“I’ve been trying to talk myself into the social-media death-spiral idea, but it feels like the wrong framework to describe what is essentially just an evolution of the way people use the internet… You could say that social media isn’t exactly dying, but bifurcating. Apps like Twitter—which don’t really offer the ability to split status updates and broadcast capacities or switch to short-form video posting—and Facebook—which are essentially so rotted out by network decay—are not fertile ground for this kind of consumption shift.” —Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic, Nov. 1
“Is writing for a private, selected audience poised to eclipse writing for a broader public on social media? … Public intellectuals might still write on open social media, but the sector as a whole would shift toward more personal and intimate forms of communication. Again, this is not a prediction. But is it such an implausible vision of the future?” —Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg, July 29
There will never be anything like Twitter again… Musk or no Musk, the vision of a global town square is dead. We have seen too much and we don’t want to look, listen or trust the squabbling voices squashed together in one place. —Shira Ovide, Washington Post, Nov. 22
Social media networking is already dead. That is, the platforms that came to define "social media" as we came to know it over the last decade-and-change—Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, to be sure, but also Tumblr and even earlier progenitors like MySpace—are largely being left in the dust and out-competed… TikTok, which is now either the first or second most popular website on the internet, is nominally "social media." But while anyone can make TikToks, the platform is designed for passive consumption, and, for the most part, an influencer-and-celebrity broadcasting model has emerged. —Edward Ongweso Jr, Vice
Indicators
Measuring app users is tricky business in the best of circumstances, and it’s made even harder now that Twitter is private. For this forecast Nonrival is using data from SimilarWeb on Android users only, for data availability reasons.
Here’s the combined total of daily Android users across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat:
Here’s a look at how many Android users are added or lost each month: Most months the gains and losses are +/- 10 million total, or .01 billion.
And here’s a reminder that Facebook and Instagram are by far the biggest of these four apps:
Finally, a couple of prediction markets about Twitter (crowd forecasts are as of this writing):
Will Twitter, Inc. file for bankruptcy in the US before 2 December 2023? 29% Yes
Will there be a >6 hour Twitter outage before mid-2023? 34% Yes
Will Trump be unbanned on Twitter?
Forecast
On Sunday, Nonrival asked whether the social media era was ending and what the chances were that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat collectively had more users* in February than in October. Overall, readers give that only a one-in-three chance of happening — you're mostly buying the end-of-an-era view and betting that these platforms won't grow. Notably, though, even readers who are predicting those platforms' decline think social media will keep growing. The gist here is a transition from one generation of social media to another.
Readers' reasoning
The case for these social platforms to shrink is, in a word, TikTok:
10%: Both the sector's decline and TikTok. If you believe some stats, it's all just going to TikTok.
30%: I don't think social media is close to dead, but I think the chosen platforms are going to bleed users as others become more popular with younger users.
And the case that they'll see a resurgence:
50%: Trump will attract users on Twitter to offset the downward trend of social media
50%: To me this may hinge on whether TikTok is banned. If yes, then 100% chance that use of other social media will be up. If not, then 50/50. Use in October 2022 is near the bottom of its range over the past year, so it might rebound within a few months, especially since Snapchat is more popular than TikTok with a key demographic. Instagram would massively benefit from TikTok losing market share, but that's far from a certainty. Twitter doesn't appear to be a massive contributor to this despite its ongoing drama.
65%: Holidays may bring in new users, plus the overall trend toward more smartphone owners and high speed network access. Trend also looks high variance so decent chance it goes back to upward trend.
*The question is looking just at Android users, worldwide, for data availability reasons.
Make your own forecast:
Fine print: This forecast will resolve based on data provided by SimilarWeb.