Facebook is stickier than email

In 1999, three portals – Yahoo, Lycos and Excite – dominated. Today, one stands. What saved Yahoo? Yahoo Mail. How? Mail is sticky like your phone number: you rarely change it. Abandoning your email is like you skipping town and not telling your friends. Of all yahoo.com visitors, 50%+ use mail.yahoo.com. You check email everyday. Yahoo pulls you to its other services.

How is Facebook stickier than email? Facebook is email, plus more (a lot more). You use Facebook to send friends messages. Facebook Inbox will become your spam-free email – only Facebook can do it because all your friends are on it. You trust it with your personal information, photos and friends. You use your real name and connect with friends doing the same thing (unlike MySpace). Abandoning Facebook is like you flattening your house, burning your photos, changing your name, skipping town and not telling your friends. Yes, Facebook is that useful. (Facebook users, anyone disagree?) That's why 50%+ users return daily. Facebook's network effects make it impossible to duplicate their network. Facebook is the phone number you will never change. Facebook is built to last more than anyone. Now, which do you think is stickier?

Comments

[andy kantrovitz]

Ah, yes, but you are required to possess a third-party e-mail account to actually set-up your facebook profile. The way I see it, it doesn't get any stickier than that if you're Yahoo! mail - the pre-requisite for facebook sign-up.

[Doug Sherrets]

Andy,

Thanks for your comment. I'd concede that on Day 1 of using Facebook the email address you used to sign up is relatively stickier; after that, it's all Facebook because your Facebook Inbox effectively replaces your old email inbox. Here's the test: you can replace your email inbox with another email service, but you cannot replace your Facebook account with another service because your real friends are all on Facebook. With Platform, it should be even more exciting and useful! :)

Thanks,
Doug

[tina]

how do yuo unblock some thing that the school blocks?

[Ryan]

According to quantcast, 59% are "regulars" on the site, but they define that as >1 visit per month. Did I miss something, or are 50% of their users truly visiting daily? It looks more like 14% are returning daily (30+ times / month) by a strict definition. They return multiple times a day, given they constitute far more than 50% of daily visits (which makes sense logically). This is generally the case with communities, although I would argue that 14% is still amazing for 30+ visits per month. Many would be lucky to get 2% of their userbase doing that.