OMG this is a total exodus! JK!
There has been a lot of conversation out there about the New York Times Magazine column, “The Medium” titled “Facebook Exodus.”
In the column, author Virginia Heffernan rings Facebook’s death knell by recounting a handful of anecdotes (most from friends of hers) about people who have grown disenchanted, bored or just fed-up with Facebook and stopped spending time there.
The only problem is that, as she writes herself, “the exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July.”
It’s hard to characterize something as an “exodus” when the only evidence of it is anecdotal stories from a few friends. It’s like watching the chicken cross the road and calling is a mass migration.
Here’s another anecdote:
Lo those many years ago when I was a reporter, I once had an executive editor who believed that his own personal experience reflected every major trend in the community. If he happened to notice that there were two new Chinese restaurants in town, within a week the paper would run a front-page story about “Area Becomes Hub of Chinese Cuisine.”
If he attended a suburban barbecue and saw two women wearing Keds, our Life section soon heralded, “Keds: Haute Staple of the Suburban MILF.” (w/o the MILF part, of course, but that was the subtext.)
Everything was a trend. And because the paper covered everything as a trend, it quickly lost every last bit of credibility it had to identify real trends. And like newspapers across the country, it experienced an exodus of readers and advertisers.