Brandindex

By Stephan Shakespeare

Is Facebook a giant of the future? Everyone’s talking about the social networking revolution, and huge valuations are being discussed for the current stars. But the question must surely be: will sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo become permanent fixtures or will they, like nightclubs and trendy restaurants, turn out to be subject to the whims of fashion?

We asked one of our special consumer panels which of a list of sites they used regularly, and which they thought they would still be using in five years’ time.

Obviously, people cannot accurately predict how they will change. We don’t know what new applications these sites will create and our survey does not measure the effect of new (younger) people coming into the market. Nevertheless, even with all these health warnings, the results are worth noting.

Google comes top, with 94% expecting still to be using it in five years, then eBay and Amazon both at 90%, Wikipedia at 79%, Yahoo! at 73%, YouTube at 63%, Friends Reunited at 59%, MySpace at 51% and Facebook at 50%.

We also asked the panel why they thought they wouldn’t be there in five years. For Google, the typical answer was that “maybe a better search engine will come along”, whereas for Facebook it was, “I’ll get bored of it and move somewhere else”.

In other words, any change for Google is predicated on it being technically bettered, while for Facebook it is seen as driven by changes in fashion.

The chart shows the progress of five online brands relative to each other that is, “normalised” at 100 one year ago, using monthly average index scores on the BrandIndex. It confirms our separate survey for the brands we currently track, with Amazon, Google (two equal top-rated brands on BrandIndex), and eBay showing the greatest sustainability.

Stephan Shakespeare is CIO of YouGov.

* For details of methodology, please see www.brandindex.com

(c) 2007 Sunday Business; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.