From Facebook to Meta Platforms: A Rocky Transition
For the past two decades, Facebook (now known as Meta) has been a central media platform for both the internet and generations of people. Recently, Facebook has once again been in the limelight through its transition to Meta and a theorized virtual space called the metaverse. However, these changes have also resulted in monetary loss for the company. It made me wonder; through Facebook’s attempted integration to Meta, have more or less people tended to seek information on the company, and how does this relate to the proposed virtual space that we now all know the name of?
In order to perform this analysis, I needed to pull a ton of information from Wikipedia. Wikipedia, although not the most highly looked upon source for accurate information, contains valuable insights about the relevance of a general topic. Because Wikipedia is a publicly editable information source, we can look at trends across statistics like article revisions, unique editors, article size, page views, and more. These statistics allow us to understand the general relevance of a topic and question sudden spikes or drops in popularity.
I firstly chose three Wikipedia articles; one for Facebook, one for the Metaverse, and one for Meta Platforms (which is the official name for Facebook’s parent company). I felt that these three articles could effectively convey the relevancy of Facebook, their integration into Meta, as well as the overall concept of their “Metaverse”. I found that, unsurprisingly, Facebook had the most changes with over 13,000 revisions with 5,600 unique editors. Both the Metaverse and Meta Platforms articles were about the same with around 1,400 revisions and about 700 unique editors. The first thing that surprised me was that Meta Platforms was first edited in 2006, just two years after Facebook was released. However, after digging deeper into the revisions, I found that the “Meta Platforms” Wikipedia page used to be the page for “Facebook (corporation)” until it was updated with the recent change. Past these simple statistics, a deeper analysis was needed to truly understand the progression of both Facebook and the Metaverse, so I began to plot out some trends.
The first thing I analyzed was the overall size in bytes of all three Wikipedia pages over time, as seen in Figure 1 above. The steady rise in Facebook content as well as the relatively recent rise in both Metaverse and Meta Platforms was expected; Facebook has been around since 2004 and has only grown since, and Facebook made the change to Meta Platforms in 2021. However, the spike in Meta Platforms from 2012–2014 was surprising. I came to figure out that between these years, the Wikipedia page for “Meta Platforms” was used for Facebook (corporation) until the corporation page was integrated into the Facebook Wikipedia page in late 2013 (as also seen by the spike in Facebook article size as Meta Platforms drops). Beyond this, there wasn’t too much to gain from this analysis so I looked at a similar visualization with rolling averages over time. You can see these rolling averages in Figure 2 below. This visualization allows you to see the overall decrease in edits made to Facebook article size over time, with the majority of information being added between 2006 and 2009. Beyond this, steady edits have been made at a relatively consistent rate. This visualization also allows you to see how much of a spike in article size both Meta Platforms and Metaverse received after Facebook announced its transition to Meta in October 2021.
My final portion of the analysis involved the overall pageviews over time through all three articles. You can see this distribution in Figure 3 below, with the pageviews log scaled for a better visual analysis. From this visualization, you can clearly see the sheer spike in Meta Platforms as Facebook released the change. There is a similar spike on the Metaverse page at the same point in time. It is important to note that the term “metaverse” originated in 1992, being initially defined on the Metaverse Wiki as “a hypothetical iteration of the internet as a single, universal and immersive virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets” (“Metaverse”, Wikipedia 2022). People became much more aware of this term as Facebook transitioned, with an average increase of about 8,400 Metaverse page views per day when comparing 2015 to 2022. However, it is also noticeable that Facebook’s Wiki page stayed pretty consistent with pageviews, which wasn’t exactly their intention. I feel like this is pretty reflective of their attempted transition; there was a general backlash, the Meta stock plummeted, and people didn’t want to transition off of Facebook as it was what they were used to. Overall, although a surplus of people became aware and researched both Meta Platforms and the Metaverse, Facebook has stayed pretty relevant despite their attempted transition into a “new” company.
