FB Stock Reflects Worlds Boredom with Facebook?

FB Stock Trading Around $27 as Reuters Poll Shows Users Bored with Facebook

Staff Report

MENLO PARK, CA - Facebook stock has still not reached the $38 a share level that it had during its IPO and NASDAQ is planning on giving around $40 million back to some investors, but a recent Reuters poll has some interesting information about Americans becoming bored with their relationship with Facebook. And all it takes is to remember the mass exodus from MySpace to know that it is possible - if not inevitable.

Here are some of the findings of the Reuters poll.

• 34% of Facebook users surveyed spent less time on the website than six months ago, with only 20% spending more.
• 80% of Facebook users surveyed never bought a product or service as a result of advertising or comments on the social network site
• Around 44% of those who took the survey said the Facebook IPO  has made them less favorable toward the social network company.

In a May 31 to June 4 poll of 1,032 Americans, 21% said they did not have a Facebook account.

Reuters wrote:

Facebook declined to comment in detail on the survey, but referred to case studies of companies such as Nutella, which found that a 15 percent increase in sales was attributable to Facebook, and restaurant chain Applebee's, whose Facebook ads delivered a threefold return on investment.

The poll has some, like Josh Wolford at WebProNews, wondering if people are bored with Facebook. He wrote:

But if users become truly bored and find the service useless, that necessity factor will only be able to keep people hanging on for a limited amount of time. Especially if other concerns about Facebook begin to tip people’s risk & reward scales. Between privacy concerns, data use concerns, uncertainties about using user activity as ads and sponsored stories, and the nagging fear that your past activities could truly damage your professional reputation, some users will begin to wonder if it’s really worth it, especially if they find themselves bored by it all.

Personally, I don’t see Facebook’s dominance waning within the next few years or even the next decade. People always talk a big game about ditching it or not needing it, but somehow it remains one of the most powerful online entities.

But it’s without question a tumultuous time for big blue.

If you have paid attention to the news recently, you know that Facebook is being sued - at least twice. Whether it is the Facebook IPO fiasco or FB privacy concerns, a lot of people are coming forward to say they are not happy with the behemoth social network. And users are not the only ones. Just prior to the IPO, GM announced they were stopping $10 million of advertising on Facebook.

This may be a "drop in the bucket" for a company that brought in just shy of $4 billion in revenue in 2011, it may be a sign of a wider problem Facebook is going to be facing. Some have reported that Facebook may not be as worth as much as $100 billion (roughly the same as Amazon.com) and many, many times the annual revenue of the relatively new social network company.

There are quite a few differences between Facebook and Myspace, but there are similarities as well. While it was a feat to attract 900+ million users to a single website, there are some who are not sure about the accuracy of those numbers. With the existence of fake Facebook accounts set-up just to market products or spam the Internet outside of Facebook's advertising model, one has to wonder how many of their reported 900+ million users are actually real people and not spammers or automated software.

Facebook has been struggling with making money from people adding status updates from their phone instead of via the website on a laptop, netbook or tablet computer. There are also some fears that game developers like Zynga may bypass Facebook on the smartphone to keep more of the revenue for themselves.

PC Magazine wrote:

Furthermore, as The Wall Street Journal points out, Facebook receives a disproportionate amount of revenue from Zynga and other game developers. That works just fine on the desktop. But on smartphones and tablets, Facebook hasn't yet managed to create a platform that will lure those developers into essentially residing within Facebook, rather than writing their own apps for iOS and Android and keeping all the revenue. One does not launch Facebook's mobile app to play games like "Mafia Wars," and it looks like this won't be the case for several years.

This may be why Facebook is working so hard to get into the mobile market with a possible Facebook phone on the horizon in 2013. They need to think of something better than sponsored stories, as those have a lot of users upset according to the NY Times.