Mark Zuckerberg’s company may be a money-printing powerhouse, but Twitter and Snap may soon eat into Facebook’s ad dollars. As GBH Insights analyst Daniel Ives told CNBC, there’s a number of factors that are boosting the prospects of both Twitter and Snap, at the expense of Facebook.
By Ives’s count, about 15-20% of Facebook-exclusive advertisers are now Twitter curious. He claims Snapchat has also become more attractive to advertisers and posits that the app’s wildly unpopular redesign will ultimately bring in more users. (Another case for user growth might be the new and improved analytics Snapchat is offering to creators.)
All that said, Facebook is still a “favorite name” amongst social media platforms due to its more than 2.1 billion users, Ives says. But that could change eventually, especially if user growth in Facebook’s most valuable markets stagnates. For many quarters, Facebook’s expanding user base has largely been the result of acquiring international users, and we learned in the company’s most recent earnings report that Facebook actually lost a million users in the U.S. and Canada. Maybe Snap and Twitter have more room to grow in the U.S. after all.
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