The social media bubble is a hypothesis that there was a speculative boom and bust phenomenon in the field of social media in the 2010s, particularly in the United States.

Mark Cuban sounded an alarm over the social media bubble, calling it worse than the tech bubble in 2000 due to the lack of liquidity in social media stocks. ^[1] David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, said (in 2014) that "we are witnessing our second tech bubble in 15 years", ^[2] and that "What is uncertain is how much further the bubble can expand, and what might pop it." ^[3] Greenlight Capital cited several factors supporting the existence an over-exuberance, including "rejection of conventional valuation methods" and "huge first-day stock appreciations after their initial public offerings". ^[4] Since those claims, services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, ^[5] and Snapchat grew to become multi-billion-dollar corporations generating enormous revenues, though they often run at a loss.^{[ citation needed]}

The social media bubble did not happen overnight, it was a gradual growth as sites began to grow and evolve with time. ^[6] From the launch of sixdegrees.com in 1997 to present day there has been tremendous grow and adaption social networking platforms.

Cutting edge at its time, sixdegrees.com allowed users to create a profile, invite friends, and connect within a platform. ^[7] Friendster and MySpace were next to enter the social SNS arena followed by Facebook in 2004 a few years later. As development of social networking sites began to emerge a market saturation began to take into effect. Looking towards the future, Big data and bot accounts are two major threats to the social media bubble as breeches in data and social media scandals (see Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections) become more prevalent ^[8]

• Dot-com bubble
• Web 2.0
• Digital Revolution

Category:Economic bubbles Category:Social media