From the archive. First published in November 2015. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In 2015 we wondered whether a standalone app could do what a Facebook page does and take the market. A decade of answers is now available, and the summary is that nothing replaced the page. Several things took pieces of it.
Where the pieces went
- Discovery went to TikTok, where roughly 73 percent of video views come from the For You page rather than followers, and to YouTube, where views per video rose 30 percent year on year.
- Visual brand presence went to Instagram, now at three billion monthly users.
- Community went to Discord servers and Telegram channels, where delivery to members is close to complete.
- Direct delivery went to WhatsApp Channels, which reaches every follower because the feed is chronological with no ranking, and to email.
- Professional presence went to LinkedIn, now approaching 1.3 billion members.
What the page kept
Scale, advertising infrastructure, and the thing that still makes it tradeable: a page is a distinct object with transferable admin roles. On almost every competitor, the audience is attached to an account that cannot change hands without handing over a login.
That is why Facebook pages remain the largest category on general asset marketplaces despite having worse reach than several alternatives. The asset is transferable in a way an Instagram or TikTok account is not.
The uncomfortable corollary
Reach and transferability are inversely related across this whole landscape. The platforms with the best organic reach have the strictest transfer bans, because their reach depends on behavioural signals that break when an account changes hands. The platforms where ownership moves cleanly, such as YouTube Brand Accounts, Telegram channels and newsletters, distribute by subscription or search instead.
If you are building to sell, that is the single most important sentence in this article. The full comparison is in where else to build an audience.
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