Facebook launched last February, the Hobbi mobile app, which allows users to share photos and videos designed to document personal projects and hobbies, as it initially seemed to be an app that rivaled the Pinterest platform for publishing photos.
However, the Facebook company ended the application in its beta phase at the beginning of this month, only five months after its launch, in the fastest termination of an application carried out by the company so far, so why did Facebook finish the application, and what does this mean for the Pinterest platform?
Facebook’s attempt to clone a platform similar to the Pinterest network was not a surprise to many, after the great success of the Pinterest platform, as the number of active users per month on the platform grew by 26% year on year to reach 367 million in the last quarter of 2019, and also rose Total financial revenue is 35%, which indicates that there is still much room for the platform to grow in the future, but why did Facebook stop the app so quickly?
Here are 3 reasons why Facebook decided to suddenly quit the Hobbi app:
- Hobbi app is a pilot project originally:
- Pinterest is already pioneering:
- Facebook has Instagram to compete:
The application was developed by Facebook’s New Product Testing Team (NPE), which started its activity last year to create experimental applications, where Facebook stated in a post on its blog: “The goal of this team is primarily to test ideas quickly by creating small and focused applications in order to know that People find certain useful or attractive features.
She added: “These applications will change very quickly, and will be closed at any moment if they are found to be of no benefit to people, with many cases of failure expected in these applications that are developing permanently.”
That is why Facebook did not find any problem in ending the work of the (Hobbi) application after this short period had passed, after it appeared to it that the competition of the (Pinterest) platform is not that easy, and it is worth noting that the application, and in the few months that it was made available through the application store in the United States, Only got 7,000 downloads.
The Pinterest platform has been around for 10 years, during this period it gained a large base of users who wanted a platform to share hobbies, interests and ideas instead of photos and personal posts.
Then Pinterest became distinguished from Facebook and the rest of the other social media platforms, as it became the preferred platform for displaying travel advertisements, photos of home décor and fashion, and it persuaded many companies to advertise them or download their entire catalogs in its platform.
But we find that Hobbi was unable to gain a foothold in this market; Because users have already linked their photo sharing to the (Pinterest) platform, most of their friends, followers and their favorite brands are already on the platform.
The operators of the (Pinterest) platform included the Instagram application as a major competitor during the subscription registration last year, where they indicated that the Instagram application displayed marketable posts, and allowed users to create groups by bookmarking the images, and saving them in a way similar to the features that Pinterest provides .
However, a survey conducted at the beginning of 2019 showed that only 10% of Instagram users used the app to find and buy products, compared to 48% of Pinterest users.
This has made it difficult for Hobbi to compete with the Pinterest platform, and instead Facebook can add other features to the Instagram platform, which has more than a billion users, similar to those in the Pinterest platform to compete instead of Launching other stand-alone applications.
