In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, the big questions are – just how many people are giving Facebook the flick and (more importantly) will the decline in ‘followers’ be significant enough to affect advertisers?
The #DeleteFacebook campaign
The hashtag appeared on Twitter 10,000 within a two-hour period last Wednesday and the day prior it was mentioned 40, 398 times. I question if this number will ever reach a size where it has a serious impact on Facebook’s current reach of 2.2 billion people.
As Mark Zuckerberg said, “I don’t think we’ve seen a meaningful number of people act on that [#DeleteFacebook] but, you know, it’s not good.”
Even after this saga, research firm eMarketer hasn’t changed its estimate that ad spending on Facebook will increase by 22 percent this year to approximately USD$49 billion.
In my opinion, Facebook is (for now) a strong advertising medium … at least until it’s forced to change the way it uses its data to target ads.
I also predict we’ll start to see growth in social media platforms such as Are.na, “no ads, no likes, no distractions” in other words – no tracking systems.
The business model is completely different to Facebook, rather than gathering user data and selling it to advertisers, users pay a fee to access the platform. This eliminates the ability for advertisers to have exposure in this space.
For now, as Zuckerberg says, he isn’t too concerned.
Allison
