Out of business, merged with Google, a division of a global media empire or perhaps Facebook will be the largest media company in the World?

There’s been much commentary looking back on the first 10 years in Facebook’s history, phenomenal user growth, the evolution of story telling, the shift to mobile, and the impact of advertising, but what will Facebook look like in 2024?

Here are three predictions of what the future holds for Facebook.

1. What Social?

Health problems arising from two decades of information saturation and over sharing will drive the localisation of control over identity, life experiences and personal connections.

Your identity and life experiences will become your property, and will be independently controlled by you as opposed to existing within social networks.

Much the same as the role played by today’s Telco’s, commercial platforms and providers such as Facebook will exist to simply enable connections between people, and/or provide a relevant rights owned or general rich media experience by temporarily accessing your identity and experiences.

Devices, primarily wearable devices will be the norm, and will house the software that enables this transformation to independent control of identity, life experience and connections.

2. Zero users

This shift to independent control of identity, life experience and connections will force a dramatic change in Facebook’s commercial model as they lose much of their advantage and enter a more competitive environment.

Facebook will no longer derive the majority of their revenue from serving ads to active logged in users, and they will have gone from over 1.2 billion to close to zero users as we define them today.

Changing from a traditional advertising commercial model to a model more akin to a Telco, Facebook will earn fees for enabling the connection between unconnected individuals, as well as providing access to rights owned or rich media.

3. Ads gone too far

Throughout the next decade, through tracking of identity, interaction and life experience of its users, Facebook will pioneer the almost real life product placement ad model that will eventually be a catalyst in driving the shift away from controlled social networks.

Increasingly, the difference between a News Corp and a Facebook will slowly be lost, with both competing to enable connection of independent people as well as facilitate access to rich and rights owned media.

Brave new digital world

Of course this is just one stream of thought about where the digital world will head, one that perhaps creates more questions than it provides answers.

So when will these predications play out? I expect the shift towards these predications to play out in the second half of the next decade. With the first half seeing Facebook continue to grow, benefiting from an increasingly more mature stable platform that will fuel advertiser confidence and revenue growth.

What do you think life will be like for Facebook 20 years in to their life?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Hibberd has over 15 years digital marketing experience and is currently Co-founder & CEO of Tiger Pistol. Steve has a passion for Social Marketing, and works closely with key industry stakeholders in both Australia and the U.S. on developing product to make success on social easier to achieve for small business owners and marketers across the world.

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