Facebook Eats Away at Email Usage on Today's Web
According to recent analysis by the Online Publishers Association (OPA), more people than ever are spending their time online visiting content sites which provide news, information, and entertainment. Despite the emergence of social networks …
Context & Ripple Effects
The question of whether social networks would cannibalize or revive email has been open since 2007, when the Wall Street Journal asked whether social features could make email sexy again around the same time Online Spin was deconstructing Facebook as a communications platform rather than just a profile site.
The Online Publishers Association's new analysis lands on the cannibalize side: confirmed findings show Facebook's rise eroding email usage while more people than ever spend their online time on content sites offering news, information, and entertainment. For a publishing industry trade group, that framing matters — attention is measured as moving toward its members.
First-order effects
- Facebook's internal messaging displaces email for casual person-to-person communication among its users, directly cutting into the volume flowing through consumer inboxes.
- Content publishers tracked by the OPA capture a growing share of user time, giving their ad sales teams a fresh engagement argument against portals and webmail pages.
Second-order effects
- Webmail providers competing on engagement-driven ad inventory — Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail — face pressure to add social and activity features inside the inbox to slow the bleed the OPA data documents.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, everyday correspondence splits between an open protocol (email) and closed social-graph inboxes, weakening email's role as the neutral default and making each platform's own metrics the only complete record of its users' communication.
The trend: Consumer attention and personal communication are migrating from open protocols like email toward closed social platforms, turning time-share studies from research firms into the industry's contested scoreboard.