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Facebook numbers booming since Feeds launch
October 12th, 2006
When Facebook launched News Feeds and Mini Feeds over a month ago without giving users any advance notice, the user community pitched a fit over privacy concerns. Lost in the noise perhaps, some analysts applauded the move at the time because they believed the changes actually made the site better for users. Despite the possibility that feeds would cause page views to suffer in the short term, Mark Zuckerberg and the team firmly believed that the new features would “increase information flow” (as always) and ultimately increase page views.
Well, it appears they were right. According to Alexa, Facebook’s page view numbers, which have been flat all of 2006, have dramatically increased by over 40% in the last month alone.
Those are big numbers (despite Facebook’s inherently seasonal use patterns) (ironically total uniques were actually down from Aug to Sept). Facebook’s strategy of bringing more information to users via social feeds is working. Not only have the revolts subsided–but feature use has increased.
This shot in the arm couldn’t come at a better time for Facebook’s business. In particular, these new numbers should strengthen its negotiating position with potential acquirers, like Yahoo. In fact, just this morning Kevin Delaney and Rebecca Buckman at the Wall Street Journal wrote,
Facebook’s business picked up over the past month after the introduction of some new features on its site, making the company more confident about its prospects, say some of the people familiar with the matter. Google’s deal for YouTube also indicates a robust mergers-and-acquisition climate for Internet companies that could broaden Facebook’s options, these people say.
These factors reduce the incentives for Facebook’s management, which includes founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, 22 years old, to sell the company now.
Despite the bungled release, the Feeds features, which were in development for over a year, appear to be very successful. While Feeds definitely raised new privacy concerns within the user community, they are now enjoying widespread acceptance and use, and are indeed changing the way students get information on and share information with friends.
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October 12th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
you’re not considering the fact that page views increase when classes are in session (late August, early September) versus summer months?
October 12th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
While I’m not discounting the effect the feed additions had, surely the fact that students are back at school and a whole new class is signing up plays a big part.
With recent grads still online, there’s a mass of people connecting with new folks.
October 12th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
Agree w/ C… it’s hard to ignore the fact that this site, catering to the college student crowd, would see a spike in traffic due to the school year starting up again.
October 13th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
I’m a fan of feeds, and agree they increase traffic. Another component of this growth is new networks.
The numbers are not available, but I think geographic networks are exploding, at least in unsticky joining activity, since the site opened to everyone with really convenient import/invite tools. Perhaps the corporate networks are finally growing also. FB claims 40K networks, and closed networks have seen fast growth in other segments.
June 3rd, 2007 at 3:46 pm
[...] It’s now been a couple of months since the infamous feeds launch at Facebook. At the time some lauded Facebook for building a feature that would save users time but decrease overall pageviews. However, it appears that users are finding feed content so valuable that they’re actually clicking through to more Facebook pages. Page views are now 2.5x what they were six months ago (though reach is almost 2x). [...]
August 6th, 2007 at 6:12 am
[...] various Social Networks and since they released their API’s to developers they have grown leaps and bounds. I’ve enjoyed Facebook and I did think Facebook might be even able to topple Orkut in India, [...]
November 15th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Looking at Facebook (now in November of 2007) I see that the majority of users are above college student age. I’m not convinced that there would be a significant peak during the school term.
Also, page views should not be mistaken for unique visitors, nor rss feeds.
If you visit the ‘Social Chat’ service there only seems to be around 500 people at any given time, which considering that Facebook is considered to be the most visited social networking site in the US is a very small number indeed.