The Rise & Fall Of Platforms

My thesis, back in the day, was on personal use of social media and how it correlates to popularity & social status in real life. I don't think it was very groundbreaking (my half-assed data set didn't find many correlations) but I quickly realized that social media platforms are very, very fleeting.

This week, I took a look at Google Trends to see if I could get a sense of where popular opinion of social platforms is at.

First, the unsurprising ones:

Interestingly, look at the spike of interest when it was announcing Vine was closing:

And then some which have tended to stay the course (note the heavily vacation-related traffic dips):

But then, look at the titans. Facebook's latest woes aren't a new thing. In fact, it looks like a very long term pattern of slumping interest:

And which platforms are actually gaining interest at the moment?

It's less of a social media platform and more of a forum, but Reddit also sees significantly higher interest:

What can we learn from this? Many things. First, don't put all your eggs in one basket. And probably most importantly, remember public opinion changes quickly and carries powerful momentum. Once a MySpace dies, it dies quickly.

Gil Gildner is cofounder of Discosloth, a startup that revamps the way businesses pay for search marketing.