Facebook may lose 80% of its users by 2017

According to the study the height of the social network was in 2012 and last year the younger began to abandon it.

Researchers at the American University of Princeton compared the social network Facebook to a contagious disease that has spread and is now about to disappear, and may lose up to 80% of users by 2017.

The conclusion comes from two Phd students in mechanical and aerospace engineering and the results are open to peer review before being officially published.

Based on the expansion and subsequent disappearance of MySpace, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechlere estimate that the most important social network in the world which brought together more than 1.1 billion users in almost ten years of existence now walks to a drastic drop .

“It is proven that ideas, like a disease, spread contagiously among people, before they die, and this was successfully described by epidemiological models,” the researchers wrote.

The scientists applied a modified epidemiological model to describe the dynamics of social networks users using data from Google that are of public domain.

The conclusion is that Facebook reached its peak in 2012, and now must “meet a rapid decline”, and corroborating studies show that younger users of the social network began to leave it in 2013.

“Facebook may face a rapid decline in the upcoming years, decreasing 20% of its maximum size until December 2014,” write the study authors.

According to the reserachers, the social network will lose “80% of its maximum base of users between 2015 and 2017”.

So far, the social network seems to be “healthy” and the increase of the price of Facebook shares have made Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of the company, a millionaire.

Mark Zuckerberg, 29, founder and CEO of the company, has an estimated $19 billion fortune.