[LINK] "The Myspace Fallacy"

[rfmcdonald]

Slate's Will Oremus posted a very strong critique of the paper I mentioned a couple of days ago claiming that Facebook is set to peak and decline. After noting a major weakness in the theory--do all online social networks necessarily follow epidemiological models, with their peaks and dips?--Oremus is very critical about their data sources.

[T]hey pull their data exclusively from Google Trends, which measures the number of Google searches for a given keyword over time. In other words, the researchers’ claim that Facebook is faltering is based entirely on an apparent dip in the number of people typing “Facebook” into Google in 2013.

They justify this bizarre choice of proxy data by arguing that it’s “advantageous compared to using registration or membership data,” which can include inactive members. OK, then why not use daily or monthly active users, as industry analysts do? Seemingly unaware that Facebook is a public company, the researchers claim that user activity data on social networks is “typically proprietary and difficult to obtain.” They back up this assertion with a rather amusing citation: a study published in 2009 about—you guessed it—Myspace.

The Google Trends data on searches for Facebook, unfortunately, do not appear particularly reliable: There’s a huge spike in October 2012 that the researchers can’t really explain and end up simply throwing out. Yet they have no such qualms about an apparent dip in 2013. In fact, that dip is the key to their paper. If Facebook isn’t actually declining in popularity, then the Myspace model doesn’t fit.

The authors never entertain the possibility of an alternative explanation for a dip in the Google Trends data. Facebook’s numbers show that its users migrated en masse from using the site on a desktop computer to accessing it via their phones and tablets in 2013, often via the mobile app. The paper makes no mention of this trend—nor the even simpler possibility that people aren’t searching for “Facebook” as much on Google because they already know what it is and where to find it. By the authors’ logic, I guess a Google Trends search for “broadband” would suggest that high-speed Internet began to wane in popularity sometime around 2005.