Telegraaf Media Groep has given the social network Hyves until the end of this year to prove itself, before the media company takes a decision on what to do with the venture. According to figures from TMG, Hyves has about 2 million monthly active users. Its biggest competitor, Facebook, has 7.8 million users in the Netherlands, of which 6.1 million are active daily.
Most social networkers are accessing the sites over their smartphones. Telecompaper estimates that around 6.1 million consumers have Facebook installed on their smartphones. Of these 77 percent are online daily and 81 percent are active at least once a week.
According to Telecompaper's Dutch Apps Market report from June 2013, just 7 percent of smartphone users have Hyves installed on their phones. Based on an estimated 64 percent of mobile users having smartphones, this means around 620,000 consumers have the Hyves app on their phone. Despite the continued increase in smartphone use, the number of mobile users with the Hyves app is falling sharply. In June 2012, around 1.3 million consumers had the app on their smartphone, and a year earlier, the figure was 1.8 million.
In June 2013, around 160,000 consumers (26% of those with the app installed) used the Hyves app daily and another 110,000 (18%) were on the app at least once a week. Over a quarter said they never use the app. In comparison, Telecompaper figures show that Facebook is used daily by 4.6 million mobile consumers. The around 160,000 daily Hyves users pales in comparison.
Where did it go wrong? Hyves may have narrowed its focus to much to schoolchildren, while Facebook targets a broader audience and can also achieve a greater mobile reach. Hyves' downfall may also be due to a failure to continue to develop its site and too little investment. This starts a spiral of less interest among users, fewer visits to the site and a drop in advertising rates.
The social element of a social network also starts to fail once some (active) users stop visiting the site. If friends are no longer on the site as often, you start looking for alternative means of contact. Given the sharp fall in the number of users of the site, there appears just one option for Hyves - as a social network - at the end of this year: pull the plug. Showing in the next five months that it still has a reason to exist will without a doubt be a major challenge.
