FT Front page:
Twitter rival Mastodon rejects funding to protect non-profit status
Twitter rival Mastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform’s non-profit status.
With that headline the FT managed to simultaneously raise what could be seen as a small decision point in VC Land but also raises discussion on social networking to the fore. There is also the small matter of Musk but I am going to ignore that and stay on the business prospects and implications here.
Why is this important?
By coincidence or brilliant timing, The Atlantic published a piece entitled “The Age of Social Media is Ending”. That piece drills down on the history from Six Degrees in 1996 through Friendster, My Space to FaceBook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006.
Through all this and if you read the history outlined in the Atlantic you might well be shocked at how many failures there were, there was a theme I was part of:
- Html publishing
- Blogging and advent of WordPress and a host of others that came and wend
- Social Networking (friend to friend) evolved into Social Media (attention seeking, influencers, corporate publishing, corporate advertising )
- Tim Tock appeared and using a constant stream of algorithm driven personalised short, quick videos is the latest. I have no idea if it is Social Media but that dent matter here. Tick Tock has drawn the audience counting 100’s of millions.
- Parallel activities for diehards using Substack, WordPress, Blogger. About 30 million Americans blog in 2012.
- Telegram has morphed from secure chat to become the goto news source where security is paramount such as the Russia War on Ukraine.
Mastodon
This one needs its own mention.
User Growth
Oct 2022 – 300,000
November 2022 – 2.5 million
Dec 21, 2022\
8,680,894 accounts
+2,687 in the last hour
+73,906 in the last day
+296,155 in the last week
By any account the growth is enormous and driven by Elon Musk. I find Mastodon refreshing and a throw back to earlier days where I feel connection to people not corporate messaging. it should be noted that advertising is not permitted. Long may that continue.
Mastodon is a refreshing source of information where you are the algorithm. I no longer look at Twitter.
The elephant in the room
Through this time Twitter had dominated and now the question de jour is whether it can survive. I am betting it cannot.
Twitter has some 330 million monthly active users (MAU) based on its last reported data that leveraged this metric in the 1st quarter of 2019. As of 2020, Twitter’s monetizable daily active users (mDAU) stands at 166 million, which represents a 24% growth from 2019. Meanwhile, in the US alone, Twitter has 69.3 million active users as of January 2021.
Nonetheless those numbers are not large compared to Facebook with almost 2 Bn.
But both elephants suffered from being operated by one person and lack of diligent oversight. Both platforms are suffering and it would be no surprise to see them both disappear. Zuckerberg has no idea what to do next and he has picked Metaverse. Musk is seeking a … verse.
Advertising revenue was the single revenue source and advertisers are fickle – they demand results and payback. I am not a friend of advertising and I will leave their use of internet at that.
Relevance to Bankwatch
Is Social Media ending or evolving. Certainly it is no longer the platform that Banks can follow for relevant content and tags to solve customer service issues which was part of the promise earlier days.
At the higher level I believe Social Media is in midst of a big shift and will be altered seismically. Platforms such as Telegram, Mastodon and “yet to be invented” will see to that.
But there is also a larger shift here – trust; trust in the information source and in the platforms which are able self regulate.
So yes I believe Social Media is ending but predicting the replacement(s) is hard.
Bankwatch 