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Chapter 1: What recent headlines suggest about Facebook's future?
The headline this week read, Meta is dying. It's about time. It's an opinion piece on the Herald via the New York Times saying the internet giant is entering its zombie era. Or is it? Has Facebook's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, sunk so much money into failed projects, alienated users so much, angered so many governments with Meta's tax-avoiding ways, that Facebook is finally on the way out?
it used to be the social network everyone loved but somewhere along the way the community turned into a ghost town facebook is on the decline the question is is facebook dead so my big prediction is that meta will not survive the next five years let's be honest facebook feels worse than it used to way worse
But hang on, here's another story about Facebook. And this one is from four years ago. The author firmly states that the company is on the ropes.
Everyone keeps saying Facebook is dying. And that might be actually true, but it is not the full story.
I'm Alexia Russell and today on The Detail, to borrow a line from Mark Twain, have the reports of Meta's death been greatly exaggerated?
When you told me we were going to talk about that, I thought, is that headline from 2026 or is it from 2018? Or is it from 2013? Because in 2013, I found a headline, teens in the UK say Facebook is dead. 2018, the website that defined a generation is dying a slow death. The predictions have been around almost as long as Facebook has been around.
Vaughan Davis is the creative director at NZ ad agency The Goat Farm. He's written a book about Twitter, and as an advertiser, he watches the audience numbers and where they're going.
It's fashionable to say that no one under 50 is on Facebook, and certainly Facebook skews older, but if you want the largest crowd, quantum of New Zealanders or Americans or English people or almost any nationality of almost any demographic, you're going to find them still on Facebook.
So on Instagram, TikTok, whatever, the proportion of young people might be higher, but there's still a larger number of young people on Facebook than you'll find in other places, which is why it remains attractive to advertisers like my clients.
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Chapter 2: Is Facebook really in a decline or just evolving?
Yes. Unkillable.
Yes. Yes. Well, let's have a look at a few of these things that this opinion writer is saying. She goes through all the financial mistakes that Meta's made, sinking billions of dollars into things that just don't work. They're on the wrong track. Can we go through a few of those? What has Meta invested in that has been a bit of a failure?
The main ones that it's invested in that have perhaps been not so successful have been the metaverse.
Mark was so serious about this idea of the metaverse, a new kind of virtual world where people would exist outside of reality, a virtual reality, so to speak, that he was renaming the entire company to Meta. You get it? Metaverse.
So the virtual world of Meta. And this, going back to the beginning of our kōrero, reminds me of Second Life, right? That virtual space where you can take on an avatar and walk around and meet people. This is one that seems to come up every 10 or 20 years. Someone tries to do that.
Four years later, the metaverse is officially dead. Facebook has burned through $90 billion in chasing that dream. Well, it's not the future.
AI is. And the idea that they should invent and embed their own AI. And really, absolutely, you need to be playing in an AI space if you're a tech company. But if they'd looked at their own history of successes, it's mainly come about through acquisition, right, and bolting on other platforms. So that'd be the two major missteps.
I mean, I'm not a financial commentator or a financial journalist, but, you know, from a user perspective, all I see is a company that's adding platforms, adding users, and adding share of day, you know, weekly. Of the 18 hours we have awake, Meta, through its various platforms, is gradually, over time, increasing that number of hours.
And that is still going on?
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Chapter 3: What investments has Meta made that have failed?
My agency and some friends about three years ago, I think, we held a wake for Twitter called Bury the Bird in a downtown bar. Got about 300 people along. You know, when Twitter was at its best and, you know, as a journalist, you would have been engaged, right?
Yeah, fantastic. It was a great time.
It was a particular slice of life, but boy, oh boy, the conversations, the spirit, the things you could learn, the resource it created was fantastic. But under current and more ruthlessly commercial ownership, it's just withered. Having said that, to stay true to my own philosophy, I should go back and have a look, shouldn't I?
No.
No, it will just upset you. It might. So when you compare Facebook and X, is there a danger that Facebook could go down that same route or is it a broader church?
Facebook is many churches, I think. If you sit down in a cafe next to someone and have a look at their Facebook feed and your Facebook feed, it's like it's not the same app, right? Yeah. So there is a risk and a current reality that for some users, they're being served and they're self-selecting a fairly putrid feed of awful opinions. A mixture of anger and righteousness.
Yeah, but equally there's people who are really just seeing kittens and cheesecake recipes. So all Facebook cares about is your time on platform. And if you are finding that the content you're seeing, the opinions, the conversations are not rewarding to you, if we were to all spend less time on platform, then they're not stupid. They'll try and understand why that is and chase that audience.
But, you know, that's an easy thing to say, but it's a hard thing for all six billion of us to do.
Especially when most of us say, I hate it, but you're still reading it.
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