1980s to 1990s is all about Bulletin board systems (BBS) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Then we have the rise of social media we know today. It rose from the 1990s, or more specially 1997~1998 Myspace and Facebook, and various blogging and instant messaging services.
With advances in smartphones and widespread use, social media services companies are rising to their peak. Now in 2022, we notice the close down for some of it, some is under the name of acquisition. For those who miss their IPO or sell it at the peak, from unicorn to nobody. Some use the end of the age of social media to describe the current market.
We notice Facebook is trying to copy TikTok. But as a social platform which is different from where TikTok is more entertainment platform oriented. We saw Facebook integrate a TikTok-style short-video format called Reels into its platforms. Both are different and possess different strengths. Market is keep changing and never stays static for long. In particular for emerging technologies which are better for current and future generations of user experience.
For the business model based on sell the advertisement, require to sell huge market share of users and detailed micro segment profile for target marketing where advertiser required, but the global trend is toward enhance privacy, which make it less likely like the past can capture huge amount of individual user privacy data, as now regulatory required user permission and consent. This is why we saw Metaverse (formerly Facebook) start to show decline in revenue, as it is harder to get advertiser money, if less device and user they can push the advertisement who is likely to click for response.
The rise of youtube, and keyword search by nature make it more attractive for the advertiser to place their advertisement, and we can notice for a longer time people are engaged in youtube due to on demand keyword search content. Where facebook etc will lack those by design. As the world moves toward 5G and higher in near future, internet bandwidth allows for video and multimedia streaming anywhere handy. Audio visuals like movie and video content are much more engaged than purely text or with photo images alone.
Falling and decline of active user base for all social media is an unavoidable trend, as the world keeps transit toward the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) Industry 4.0. Unless they can possess some of the active reasons people want to use it daily and frequently. Now even the very fundamental search engine is undergoing a challenge from ChatGPT which provides a better search experience. The future from 2023 and onward will be interesting to see how social media either evolves with the time or slowly sunset from the market. In the near future we expect to see artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots produce tons of automated generated content for consumption, where we should not be surprised to see when it rolls out.
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