Biiiiiiiiig breaking news this morning: Facebook loses 400,000 UK users in a month

Facebook has suffered its first drop in numbers in 17 months of successive monthly gains. That’s according to online usage research firm Nielson Online, which claims the number one social networking site experienced a 5 per cent drop in unique users between December and January from 8.9m to 8.5m.

Facebook’s biggest rival, MySpace, also experienced a 5 per cent drop during the same period, with a unique monthly user figure of five million. Third-placed and teenage-focused network, Bebo, suffered a 2 per cent drop between December and January, with figures of 4.1 million unique monthly users.

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Now the whole “I told you so” and other “the end of social networking is near” can start. Truth is Facebook is getting boring, and now that we all have our 500+ friends it is getting harder and harder to find a reason to go and visit that site. But a big question remains: where do all the bored workers go next?

I was on TV yesterday (video here, be nice) talking about Google’s domination, and came up wondering who is still clicking on ads these days. Conventional wisdom used to say that “new users click on ads”, but now that we are all turning into savvy internet veterans with years of surfing under our belts, who still thinks that the results on the right ARE the non-sponsored results?

A new study released this morning came up with a few interesting findings about ads-clickers and tells us that “heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad click”.

The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers. Further preliminary Starcom data suggests […] shows no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked.

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If the other 50% are indeed fake clicks then we are headed towards a nice crash of the current Internet monetization system.

Interesting discussion during Dave Brown’s Generation Y workshop at LIFT08. It seems asking a few teenagers how they use the Internet is always going to produce a few findings like these:

• Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.
• They don’t like to buy online much and as a result don’t do it very often, whereas especially for these kids finance is not really a problem. It’s a trust issue.
• Although they consider their online friends and real friends to be the same (even if that’s talking about 300 people), the ‘real world’ is very important for them and don’t want to spend too much time online.
• Facebook is definitely still very hot! It’s used for planning of the immediate future and also for homework. Email within Facebook is used, but for totally different reasons as regular webmail such as Windows Live Hotmail.
• Last stunning fact: The images you find within the results of an image search are free to use for whatever reason, why else are they there? That’s the reaction when someone talked about Creative Commons. So we told them these images still are owned by someone and have some kind of copyright applied to it.

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We need such a panel on stage one of these days.

The TSR is uploading the LIFT08 speeches in almost realtime on nouvo.ch/liftvideo

Enjoy and pass the word :)

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who is the co-founder of an online groceries store that delivers food (real food, « organic » as the Americans would say ;) to the citizens of this country. You go to a website, push a few buttons, and you get your food delivered at home the next day. A simple value proposition, one of the biggest logistical challenge I have ever seen hiding behind it.

At some point he told me this:

« My daughter never went to a supermarket. She is 10 years old and knows either online stores - for basic products - or the farmers’ market – for touching products and have a real shopping experience. »

I won’t argue against the fact he is not representative of the whole population, nor will I try to speculate on how much of this situations comes from the girl’s will to support her daddy’s business ;) But it is an interesting evolution. Never go to a supermarket is now conceivable, and if was not true 10 years ago.

If you visit a Carrefour store in France, you will notice how they are focusing on giving consumers a different experience, branding each section of the shop with extreme care, making it more attractive, different, « authentic ». You can get your aspirins from a lady sporting a white blouse, a totally different experience than getting it yourself from a random shelf.

The future of grocery shopping might be a wonderful, sensitive and spectacular experience on one side, with computers, recommendation engines and home delivery on the other. Does that strike a cord? Sounds an awful lot like Apple stores to me.

I had a recent discussion with a Skype exec who was telling me how bad the integration with eBay was going, as eBay was such a hierarchical and procedural organization. Hierarchical and procedural? Not something you would expect from a young company like eBay right?

But it is not 2000 anymore. Time has passed. Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon, Google, these organizations are now mammoth struggling with big companies problems like inertia, internal politics, miscommunication, etc…

This Cory Doctorow article on Amazon’s problems with understanding the logic of the download market further confirmed my intuition that we entered a new era: the bus drivers era.

The internet industry is not driven by young hot mavericks anymore. It is now headed by big time CEOs with shareholders, middle managers and a focus on quarterly reports. Their job is to keep their user base satisfied via incremental innovation, not to change the world anymore. The CEOs of the internet industry are now like the CEOs of any industry : they are bus drivers.

Ebay looks more and more like Microsoft. Yahoo currently seems to be as exciting a company as AT&T or GM. Google is slowly cutting itself from users every day. Growth has a price as it forces you to manage a very different set of non value-adding things.

And the web industry is certainly less fun than it used to be.

Just before you go to LIFT08, head to Sierre on January 25th to listen to Bruno Giussani and Frederic Kaplan talk about communicating objects and mobile internet, the future of the web?

LIFT lab is managing the morning program of what should be an interesting day in Valais to discuss some of the two most important trends on the Internet. More information on rezonance.ch

This is one of the main upcoming changes on the web: HD. You can feel the movement brewing with sites like the HD web. Now YouTube seems to be joining the ranks of HD content providers in a few months. About time.

Davos is really shaking it’s image of a closed and elitist conference. The latest move: youtube.com/davos, or your chance to jump in the debate right from your computer screen.

Congrats to Matthias Luefkens and the WEF teams for pushing the envelope like this. For more information head to GenevaLunch.

I’m finally giving Twitter a try out of curiosity. No guarantee I’ll be there for long but so far so good. It is strange to open an account on a system you know could ruin your privacy like that. It makes you look at the features with extra care.