Back in January, when I was preparing our TV[R]EV Annual Predictions, number one on the list was the decline of Facebook. There were many reasons for that, most having to do with that fact that while Facebook had indeed reinvented itself many times over—from digital dorm room slam book to MySpace killer to Bejeweled Blitz game board to political debate center to fake news haven—it had wound up in a place where people were struggling to figure out why they were still on there, other than habit.
Since then, Facebook’s seemingly been on a nonstop negative news cycle. Every time it looks like they’re finally coming up for air, someone at the company firmly places their foot inside their mouth (Holocaust denial anyone!) and the negative news cycle starts all over again.
How much of what's happened is due to hubris and and how much of it is due to naiveté is something that’s bound to be debated for years to come, and I suspect the answer depends a lot on how you define hubris and how you define naiveté.
So there's that.
AOL 2.0
It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.
There was AOL, which defined the internet in the 90s and early 00s, a service whose seminal movie, “You’ve Got Mail” was just a sweet romcom, as opposed to a founding myth takedown like “The Social Network.”
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time, not all that long ago either, when every TV and radio commercial ended with “and check AOL keyword [NAME OF PRODUCT]” and where people were excited to hear “You’ve got mail!” because it meant they’d gotten a missive from a friend, not a notification from a Macedonian-based phishing company telling them they needed to re-enter their banking information immediately.
Sometime after 9/11, AOL seemed to disappear from the face of the earth, or at least that part of it the media takes notice of, only it didn’t, it just shrunk a little bit and kept on chugging and millions of people still had AOL email addresses and read and watched AOL-web content and there were enough of them for Verizon to deem it a wise move to buy AOL for $4.4 billion just three years ago, regardless of whether you personally think that was a wise decision. And today the folks at Verizon are doubling down on that AOL purchase, combining it with that other 90s favorite Yahoo, putting them both back on tour as “Oath.”
And so Facebook won’t disappear from the earth either, not for a while, at least, but like AOL it will gradually recede from the media spotlight and the next generation will continue to damn it as “Mombook” or maybe even “Grandmombook” but enough of their mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers will use it so that a latter-day Verizon will eventually be willing to part with billions of dollars in order to own it.
So there’s that t00.
The Watch Fiasco
There’s also the whole Watch thing and the Live thing before that, which seems to be equal part hubris and naiveté, hubris that they could actually take on the television industry without bothering to learn a thing about it, and naiveté for thinking that the business couldn’t be all that hard to figure out.
The issue with Watch isn’t whether they’ll figure out the interface or if they’ll actually bother to promote it to the two billion people using the platform so that they’re not left wondering why there’s some kind of “play” arrow on the bottom of their app. (Though even a nod to the fact that all of that is a problem would be reassuring.)
No, it’s not that. It’s whether they’ll actually be able to get people to watch anything longer than a few minutes on their phones or their laptops and how they don't seem to realize why that’s going to be so much tougher than it sounds.
Tougher for sure, but not impossible, and there’s big money being placed on it, both by Facebook and by all the people investing in Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new high quality short form video venture.
There are, however, a whole lot of moving parts, including the fact that the kind of early adopters who might make 10 minute mobile video series a thing aren’t on Facebook anymore, and the people who are on Facebook aren’t much up for trying new things, especially things like 10 minute mobile video series.
So there's also that, and it's a big one.
But Instagram
Facebook the app may be looking pretty rough right about now, but Facebook the company appears to be in a decent enough place.
It owns Instagram, arguably the hottest social platform right now, beloved by Millennials and Gen Zs alike, and, increasingly, their parental units. There’s WhatsApp too, the sleeping giant, which is killing it in places without unlimited texting plans (i.e., the rest of the world) and is primarily a chat program, which, last time I checked, was up there with VR and mobile video as the Holy Trinity of the Future of the Interwebs.
There's A Reason They Call Them Data Users
Facebook has bigger problems than bored or underengaged users. It’s got data problems, as GDPR spreads its privacy loving embrace across Europe and eventually America, and Facebook feels compelled to block third party data providers in return. That makes Facebook much less valuable to advertisers without much of their own first party data, advertisers like CPG companies and entertainment companies. And that's a problem because given the degree to which Facebook tracked users across the web, learning their every click and mouse drag, lots of those advertisers are going to be looking at a nasty withdrawal scene, if and when Facebook pulls the plug. They want their data, they need their data, and if Facebook can’t get it for them, then someone else will.
Triage
The main task Facebook has right now is to stop the bleeding, stop the advertisers from walking, the users from disengaging, the media from wagging its tongue.
It’s likely the internet, or at least people’s use of it, has changed too dramatically this time and Facebook will go down as a cultural artifact of the teens, something kids dress up as on Halloween, the way they currently dress up as hippies or Madonna.
Instagram and WhatsApp have a while to go before they too became ancient history, but a platform isn’t a medium and Facebook's day in the sun is starting to see the first long shadows of the dusk.
