The Changing Landscape of Digital Media

New data from Pivotal Research shows that Facebook lost the attention of adults in 2017. Adults spent 4% less time on the social network year over year. Sounds alarming when put in that context but in reality, it’s a small change to a global audience. For now.

Keep in mind that not so many years ago, newspapers were in a similar position. They collectively said in effect, “we will always be the best and biggest” And that is too bad. Their myopic approach to growth strategies was more of the same. History tells how well that strategy worked.

So is a 4% decrease for Facebook a big thing? If the trend continues, yes. Facebook’s audience reach took a significant hit in 2017

Here are excerpts from this story published on Business Insider today.

US adults shifted their attention away from Facebook in 2017, according to Pivotal Research analysis of Nielsen data per Business Insider. The amount of time adults spent on Facebook declined 4% year-over-year (YoY) in November 2017.

Meanwhile, time spent by US adults on Google platforms in November 2017 reached 28.6%, up 5 percentage points YoY. YouTube drove much of this growth, as time spent on the video platform grew almost 30% per month in 2017, likely as a result of increased viewership of YouTube on smart and regular TVs — users view over 100 million hours of watch time on living room devices daily, for example.