Inside Facebook: the Facebook Book

On June 6, 2007 I boldly predicted this would happen within a year, and now, here it is. Facebook and Myspace have the same amount of traffic according to Alexa! Myspace still exceeds Facebook in the U.S. specifically, but globally, they are identical, and the alexa’s reach number is poised to soon favor Facebook as well.

Facebook also reports 50 million active users, and over 36 Billion pageviews a month. Alexa similarly reports that each visitor averages 30/PVs/day on Facebook, with 10% of this now coming from apps pages. For completeness let me add, Compete.com reports much lower numbers for Facebook, showing myspace still very clearly ahead. I can’t compare methodologies here, but it seems to me that Comscore’s results more closely corroborate Alexa.

Some people say facebook is over hyped. In the dotcom bust, pageviews came from unsustainable advertising and excessive IPO funded burn rates. Facebook’s growth and usage is naturally viral and organic, and the company is profitable. Three weeks ago, I posted 7 ways that facebook is poised to exceed google in traffic, and only #6 has seen any activity so far, and that announcement on Nov 6th is likely to be bigger than I expected. We’ve seen leading companies regularly eclipsed by better newcomers, and that is likely to continue and even happen more quickly riding on social networks, so no one can predict whether FB will be relevant in 10 years, but the rising curve still has a long way to climb.

I now predict that FB will exceed two out of three of these by Jun 6, 2008: google.com, live.com and youtube.com. Google will be moving heavily into open social networking with an api launch next month, and youtube continues to grow reach very effectively. MSFT is shift msn.com traffic to live.com rapidly. Since this would make Facebook a global top 5 website, it would be non-trivial. More significant will be whether facebook exceeds the combined traffic of google/youtube/orkut or yahoo.com. It is clear they are working hard on the monetization of this traffic, in a way that doesn’t impact the user experience. myspace went with ad volume and visibility, and facebook is looking only to ad quality.

For me personally, the most exciting part of this is the tremendous explosion of creativity we will see with social network applications as widgets as the entire ecosystem competes on openness and features, for the hearts and passion of a million developers.

Never before has an internet site grown as the Facebook. Never. On June 6th, just 4 months ago, I predicted that within a year FB would be larger than myspace, and though this was in no way obvious then, it is now on track to happen before the end of 2007. FB’s global reach, at 4.5% today, is about 1 percentage point under myspace.

Interestingly just this week for the first time, FB’s proportion of vistors from U.S.+Canada+U.K. slipped under 50%, which is still the highest proportion at any SN. The world is now growing faster than the core, since growth in all segments is very strong and the world has a relatively smaller installed base.

Sites come and go, so what will FB do over the next 2-3 years to become the single largest internet destination?

1. Roll-your-own networks and/or organize your friends. We’ve seen public evidence that FB is planning friend lists, and the questions are only whether those will be public or private (my friends for X vs. a group of friends that is X network) and how well they will integrate with other API features.
2. International. Fortunately FB is built on php and mysql, which are naturally multi-byte. Just in japan/korea/china, this could easily double site traffic.
3. Marketplace coming to its potential. Wouldn’t you rather buy from someone you know? The scale of use vastly exceeds any other classifieds engine including craigslist, and the specificity of targeting and grouping is unmatchable.
4. A truly relevant feed. Right now only 10% of what is in my feed is interesting to me, but this is a only a very difficult relevance tuning problem, since less than 1% of my news makes it into my feed. What if this rose to 50% and I had visibility into as much of it as I wanted to see?
5. Full communication: a full featured messaging system, integrated teleconferencing and voice, easy IM, organized broadcasting through feed and notifications.
6. The FB ad platform, leveraging both the profile information, ultimate targetting and segmentation, and scale of a quarter billion members, will be offered as the preferred model for monetization of FB apps.
7. Multiple profiles per account, multi-page profiles, and public/private/target specific views. It can’t all fit in one view, and when FB solves this in several years, they will again double page views, and solve that many more use cases.

(note: i have no insider information about any of this.. i’ve just been watching and using heavily.)

And when they get around to it, they will monetize, and I praise Zuck for making the battle against irrelevant, annoying ads an essential characteristic of FB. Any perceived revenue problem just shows a severe lack of imagination.

Certainly myspace, google and yahoo are following furiously and hundreds of startups are seeking the next paradigm shift. The next super site will probably grow more quickly than even FB did, leveraging the viral tools of all SNs. So we can just know that the pace of internet innovation - more people, more devices, more real tools and solutions, more fun and imagination - will only continue to increase.