David McManus returns to the web’s big debate

When I submitted my copy for last week’s piece on the future of Facebook — earlier than usual because of Christmas deadlines — I had no idea about the imminent publication of an extensive European study on the site’s use which picked up a great deal of attention.

According to reports, the study, conducted by the ‘it does what it says on the tin’-sound-ing Global Social Media Impact Study (gsmis.org), came to the conclusion that Facebook is ‘dead and buried to teens’.

Read the report and you will not actually find anything particularly enlightening about the social media website’s use by young people.

It turns out that headline-grabbing phrase actually came from a blog post written by Professor Daniel Miller, the lead researcher in the study.

So just what is going on? Should Facebook be concerned about it future?

To me it seems clear that the people sitting around the boardroom table at Facebook HQ are trying to change what the site actually is and how people use it.

It could stay a simple destination for people to share pictures and updates, but there is little money to be made in that market and Facebook is now a publicly owned company.

Instead it has an ambition to become your one-stop location for all news, be it a world- shattering headline or a snap of your mate on a night out.

It seems unlikely that Facebook would be oblivious to the fickle younger market. The web’s history is littered with websites that were once huge until everyone decided to leave one day.

No, Facebook is actively courting a more mature market (mature in years, at least). They are the ones with money to spend on advertisers after all.

So here we have the absolute nub of Facebook’s problem. It may seem daft to hypothesise over the demise of a site that is used actively by over a billion people, but if it cannot appeal to a young market, that number will ultimately decline.

It is also clear that people really still only want that simple place to share pictures and updates and are far less interested in all the extras that the site has been pushing into news feeds.

Clearly Facebook is far from doomed but there is definitely no well-lit path ahead to guide it into the future.

It simply must focus on its core use or it won’t be just teenagers who start to turn away.