Facebook Is Not Worth $169

Yes or no.

Will Facebook (FB) face permanent fundamental damage based on its current Cambridge Analytica news?

My verdict? No.

Like most things, the media is blowing this out of proportion for the sake of clicks and views. The sole purpose of a media outlet is to attract eyeballs, and as they do so often, they jump from one “news” band wagon to another. Facebook just happens to be the punching bag of the day.

Here’s a piece from the NYT making it sound like users are leaving Facebook in droves.

Let’s assume that 60,000 people deleted their profiles like Cher.

No, wait.

I’ll call and raise it to 1,000,000 deleted their account.

Of the 1M users, this obviously includes deactivated accounts and those that were dormant to being with. People with these accounts will be the easiest to delete. If I take a very bad guess and say 20% of these accounts were idle, that means 800,000 active accounts were deleted.

Huge number right?

Here are some facts to put this into perspective thanks to Zephoria and the 10-K.

Worldwide, there are over 2.13 billion monthly active Facebook users for Q4 2017 (Facebook MAUs) which is a 14 percent increase year over year.

There are 1.15 billion mobile daily active users (Mobile DAU) for December 2016, an increase of 23 percent year-over-year.

1.40 billion people on average log onto Facebook daily and are considered daily active users (Facebook DAU) for December 2017, which represents a 14 percent increase year over year

With 2.13B active Facebook users, 800k deleted accounts equates to 0.04% of total accounts deleted.

Facebook’s Moat

Even with the company headlining the news, here’s a legitimate reason why people are not leaving Facebook.

I have a very large extended family and most of them are on Facebook. We are spread all over and it’s the only way we know what’s going on. I tried to get them to come to twitter with no luck. So I may be stuck there for awhile longer.

— Quancy Clayborne (@QuancyClayborne) March 21, 2018