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I don't have a Facebook account but I do have WhatsApp and Instagram. I'd use a Facebook standalone messenger that didn't require a Facebook account to communicate with those that do if such a thing existed. I closed my FB account a year ago and I don't miss it at all. Sure there are times where someone asks if I saw something and it was only posted to FB but that is so rare now.

I imagine that one day I'd use many Facebook properties without ever encountering the news feed.

I'm pretty certain you can have a Messenger account with just a phone number, no FB account required.

> people are leaving it at an unprecedented rate.

[citation needed] (Even among teens Facebook's growth has not slowed much, let alone unprecedentedly.)

You make a fair point, I said that just from an empirical standpoint. As in, at the beginning of 2014 only a couple people didn't want to use Facebook and mainly because of dissident/im-not-like-everybody-else reasons (i.e. everybody was there, so much that there were even some reluctant to join). At the beginning of this year, probably 4 out of 10 of the people I meet do not have significant activity w/ the site, and the reasons are more substantial, like in 'because I don't like it anymore' (i.e. not everybody is in there anymore, and now people is instead reluctant of staying there). That's unprecedented and me and those people are exactly the demographic that drives the gain or fail behind these things.

> You make a fair point, I said that just from an empirical standpoint.

Usually when people use the word "empirically" it means they have some actual empirical evidence to bring to the table, not just random anecdotes.

If 40% of any segment of Facebook customers had substantially reduced their usage in the past year, that would indeed be unprecedented. I don't see a shred of evidence to support that supposition though.

But that's what empirical means...

It is what I saw in the past year, but you are right, I can't provide a completely verifiable and correct statistic to support my argument. Neither is it going to exist, because I don't think Facebook will ever state 'yes, we are going out of business'.

Must be hard to live your life based only on actual evidence all the time man. I can't imagine how much time do you invest verifying everything. Kudos for that.

well likely those people realized that all facebook really is a medium to exhibit your ego and that it's shallow and for narcissist. nobody posts facebook about what's really going on with their lives. nobody instragrams about things that makes them look bad.

>I'd like to hear what you'd think if 'Core Facebook' went out of business right now (but not WhatsApp/Instagram)...Was it a profitable endeavour or not?

Core Facebook probably would have been profitable. They declared after tax earnings of over $2bn for 2010-2013. I dare say they raised over $20bn from investors but much of that went on WhatsApp & Instagram.

In reality of course they are not going out of business right now and are worth quite a few billions.

They're worth $217b to be exact and have an EBITDA of $6b (on $11b in revenue).[0] They are effectively "printing money" at this point.

[0] - http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=FB+Key+Statistics

I would assume that evaluation includes all of Facebook, not just the core portion.

What exactly is "core facebook"?

FB without WhatsApp or Instagram (see the GGGGP)

But thinking about it more, my earlier post wasn't relevant to this thread since the message I replied to was just expanding upon the idea of Facebook printing money and it should be okay to include Instagram and WhatsApp revenues there.

I find it hard to believe that it is worth 2/3 of what google is when the revenues are 6 times lower, less diversified (if you can call oculus rift an investment). Printing money seems like an overstatement, they are financing it largely at a cost and I just don't see how you can monetize what essentially is facebook, a free chat device inferior to skype.

Social networking is based on communication. If we can say it is some kind of segment, given the market size does not change rapidly, any alternative emergence in communication leads to potential losing market share for existing players. Snapchat as a way to communicate is definitely grabbing the market share now. So as long as they can grow well, it will become the true next big thing(if they are not one already). I think the market share of communication point of view could provide some help to understand this. I found this out not long ago and believe this is one of the key dimensions to know the landscape better. I have not given any more deep thoughts on this yet.

I don't see fb going out of business anytime soon because their more lucrative market (middle-agers who actually have money, rather than their kids who don't) isn't going to be jumping ship. They're completely captive and the switching costs for people in their 30s-60s is so much more mentally taxing than for teens & young adults.

What I also notice about FB is that people are using it entirely for chatting.