Facebook: The Medium That Sticks

Jessi Hempel’s recent Fortune Magazine article about Facebook (”How Facebook is taking over our lives”) is a great read. It’s part analysis, part retrospective, and part Silicon Valley human interest story…indeed, we were happy to read that Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, “who favors jeans and T-shirts, has taken to wearing ties” this year. 2009 will be a big year for social networks.

This Fortune piece presents a number of striking figures and stories about Facebook’s explosive growth. For one, there’s the stat about reach: Facebook will attract its 200 millionth user sometime in the next few months. There are the stats around sharp adoption rates: while it took television 38 years to gain 150 million users, Facebook crossed this point in only 5 years. And then there are the anecdotes about Facebook’s near-ubiquity in business — the stories of small-biz owners, for instance, creating Facebook groups, pages, and applications alongside the big brands.

Personally, we were most drawn to this fact:

“[Facebook's] addictive quality keeps [its] typical user on the site for an average of 169 minutes a month, according to ComScore. Compare that with Google News, where the average reader spends 13 minutes a month checking up on the world, or the New York Times website, which holds on to readers for a mere ten minutes a month.”

This unprecedented level of “stickiness” is a boon to marketers of all shapes and sizes, and a reflection of the seismic shifts that are happening right now across the advertising and marketing worlds. To think that millions upon millions of ad dollars have been poured into media where the average user only spends ten minutes each month — in this economic climate, it’s clear that industry has every incentive to find a better way of reaching out.

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