7 ms·

The Reality of Missing Out

147 points by rememberlenny 11y ago

petra 11y ago
So how will that affect the smaller sites (content , etc)? or they have already adapted to most such effects and there will be no change ?
rubidium 11y ago
I'm new this this, so help me out. If this is true (particularly the reference to advertising=1.27% of GDP) then an expectation of future revenue of all FaceGoog-advertising will be in the range of 1.27% x (GDP of US) x 50% of advertising market. This works out to 115 Billion per year. Google+FB's market combined current revenue is $93 Billion. Is that reasonable? If so, isn't FB's market cap a little silly?
- benlower 11y ago
  Why only 50% of the ad spend? I think the article makes the case that all ad spend is moving to digital. Probably not ever reaching 100% but a lot closer to 100 than to 50.
  - rubidium 11y ago
    50% is a guess based more on the linked article that shows the internet share of advertising's growth rate is slowing down (http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-02-28/ADS_revenue-after-5-years.jpg http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-02-28/ADS_revenue-after-5-yea...). Also look at the linked graph from the 1.29% article: http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-02-28/ADS_medium_share2.jpg http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-02-28/ADS_medium_share2.jpg Each generation of advertising takes over more, but magazine, radio, are remarkably robust. TV will remain too (even if some transfers to Hulu/Netflix/etc...).
    - morgante 11y ago
      > 50% is a guess based more on the linked article that shows the internet share of advertising's growth rate is slowing down That's mostly due to the explosive growth of mobile, which it seems that graph leaves out.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  Their valuation isn't based on monetizing the US market, but the entire world.
  - rubidium 11y ago
    Ok, so that's a x4.2 difference. Of course, globally they face some stiffer competition.
    - mathattack 11y ago
      A couple thoughts: 1 - Market cap is (theoretically) the Net Present Value (NPV) of future cash flows. You have to be careful about comparing this NPV (discounting forever) with a 1 year slice. When interest rates are low, the future cash flows have a lot of value. 2 - Facebook's value is likely based on other things too. Advertising is just 1 way to monetize their users. Imagine hijacking all of voice communications as an example.
      - rubidium 11y ago
        Thanks, that is helpful additional info. So to summarize, the market value of facebook assumes 1) It becomes co-dominant web-advertiser with google in the US AND 2) It finds another way to make some money (either by other advertising markets OR other products/features that people pay for).
        mr_luc 11y ago
        Which is pretty plausible, right? (Becoming co-dominant with google). The other thing to consider is the competitive/strategic landscape. It's not so much that the market 'assumes' that Facebook will invent new ways of making money, but rather that regardless of who figures it out, facebook is so incredibly well positioned at the moment (ubiquitous social network) as to give it a large competitive advantage, and let it eat other companies' lunch. The market has examples of other similarly well-positioned companies, like Microsoft in the early 90s, to draw on.
        11y ago
- gnopgnip 11y ago
  Revenue =/= market cap
- morgante 11y ago
  > Is that reasonable? If so, isn't FB's market cap a little silly? Facebook's market cap is $267.7B, which would be totally justified at $115B in revenue. Also keep in mind that the 1.27% is not fixed. Advertising has fluctuated as high as 2% of GDP, which leaves plenty of growth potential for Facebook and Google.
  - rubidium 11y ago
    Yea, I agree if its revenue reaches $115B. I guess I question that happening if it has to share the pie with Google. But I see more now why it's valued as it is (I don't think it's silly).
nostrademons 11y ago
I would bet that the dominant form of advertising of the 21st century hasn't been invented yet. First off - take a look at the historical technologies he calls out in the post. Radio and TV didn't even exist yet at the height of the Gilded Age. The dominant media was newspapers (Pulitzer & Hearst, etc.), which ran a scaled up, largely self-service, mass-media form of the advertising which worked in the 19th century. Much like how Google/YouTube/Doubleclick, Facebook, and Craigslist run scaled up, personalized, carefully tracked forms of the advertising that worked in the 20th century. The concept of "brand advertising" at all didn't exist until the early 20th century. Why? Because "brands" as a concept were enabled by the technologies of mass production, mass consumption, and mass media. Before it becomes economical to spend millions of dollars building awareness, need to have an audience of millions of people with the disposable income to buy your product, and you need the capacity to make & distribute millions of them. The capacity to build them became available in the 1870s, the capacity to distribute them in the 1890s and 1900s - but the audience of millions of people who could afford them didn't happen until living wages started to become a thing in 1914, and it took a generation to spread throughout the population. I'll predict that the 21st century will see a trend to toward smaller firms, hyper-personalization, local manufacturing, and custom services over products, much as described in The Refragmentation [1]. The technologies of cheap solar energy, 3D printing, the Internet, self-driving transportation, and pervasive computing (beyond mobile - the wearable market will dwarf mobile to the same extent that mobile dwarfs PCs) will make it much more economical to build small production runs tailored tightly to individual preferences than mass-market consumer goods. The forms of advertising used to make people aware of these goods will shift as well, creating a new category on top of "brand" that is to brand advertising as brand is to coupons, but who knows what that ultimate form will be? If you can figure it out, it's probably a trillion-dollar market. I think that Etsy, Kickstarter, Yelp, LinkedIn, AirBnB, etc. are all harbingers of the type of company that will dominate the 21st century, but they're struggling now because they're early. People haven't yet let go of the old ways of thinking of social & economic organization, so they evaluate 21st-century business models in terms of 20th-century industries. Yelp and LinkedIn in particular are in trouble, because their customers are all embedded in old-economy value chains (local businesses, employment), and so they're in this weird position where their own business model assumes a networked, hyper-personalized world but their customers will disappear if that world comes to pass. It'll be interesting to see whether these first-generation marketplaces can hold on and prosper in a few decades, or whether they'll go under and be replaced by companies that build on their ideas but with new value chains. Historically, most of the first-movers in the industrial revolution died out, and the household names of the 20th century were large conglomerates formed by their carcasses. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html
hitekker 11y ago
I've heard the line that, for most startups, advertising is where business models go to die.
- beat 11y ago
  I saw a great presentation once that put a slide up with several well-known companies - Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. The presenter asked what business they're all in. The answer is advertising. Then he put up a slide with over 200 companies. What business are they all in? Advertising. Then he pointed out that advertising is only 2% of the GDP, and internet ads aren't even a majority of that. The point was to consider enterprise and medtech for startups instead, places where real businesses will pay real money for your products, rather than going out to find a million eyeballs and trying to sell them.
- mej10 11y ago
  If you have a lot of high quality page views (like at least 10M per month, more if they are low quality) and you don't have a business model, maybe consider advertising. At a CPM of $3.00, you could pull in 30k revenue per month. As long as you are seeing good user growth, you can build a decent business, but not an "up and to the right"-style startup. Otherwise the economics just don't work out, and it is a painful road.
tryitnow 11y ago
We're seeing the same consolidation that happens with any new industry. There used to be a hundreds of automobile manufacturers, eventually that shrunk to the Big Three in the US.
vdnkh 11y ago
I wonder how a future dominated by Facebook/Google advertisements will affect the multitude of adtech startups. They all aim to solve problems that the two giants air aiming to accomplish by gaining control of the whole funnel. Combined with the rise of adblockers, will there be enough money left?
- hackercomplex 11y ago
  Facebook is keeping a tight lid on their core metrics around how effective their mobile advertising platform is. IMHO nobody really knows yet how effective mobile advertising is in the large, we're still in the early days. It'll all come out in the wash over the next decade or two.
- jkot 11y ago
  My guess is that easy & reliable micro-payment system emerges.
- adTechGuy 11y ago
  AdTech companies are completely fucked. Just totally and utterly fucked. Google and Facebook are kicking their asses left and right. Google "worked with" 3rd parties for the better part of a decade while they improved on their products, but now they are working to muscle them out by taking their best products and blocking them to adtech companies. They took youtube inventory out of their Ad exchange last year. It cost them nothing to do so but crippled a handful of video ad companies and exposed them as powerless. Criteo has long been held up as an example of a company that managed to forge its own way, but eventually they've started running out of gas too. Their stock price has been tanking since last summer. It's not surprising either. Criteo's bread and butter are dynamic ads, which show specific products to retail shoppers. Well Facebook rolled out its own version of that and it's pretty tremendous. Criteo has to resell that product or lose relevance to its customers but now its just a reseller instead of providing the ad serving and inventory for its customers. This destroys its value proposition majorly.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dcole2929 11y ago
From a business perspective this makes a lot of sense. I have said time and time again that Facebook has absolutely deserved it's valuation (when a lot of others disagreed), and have made similar comments in regards to Snapchat. In short I'm a fan. That said, is a world in which all ad revenue is basically being filtered through 4 or 5 companies necessarily a good thing? There have been a few studies that have shown that millennials, and whatever there calling the generation after them are already largely immune to Ads. So isn't there likely a point in time as these generations become increasingly larger percentages of overall population when Ad Revenue starts to fall. If the people you want buying things in 15 years don't pay attention to ads what happens to the industry? And in the meantime if it's Facebook, Google, Verizon, Snapchat or nothing, what happens to all the other apps and webpages currently only surviving on meager Ad Revenue if advertisers abandon them wholesale? Can something like Reddit even exist when it makes very little money on it's own and can't subsidize with Ad revenue?
- adTechGuy 11y ago
  Something from your first paragraph answers the question in your second paragraph! Yes, all advertising will be filtered through Google, Facebook and someone like a Verizon (or whichever Telco can weaponize its data best, currently looking like Verizon). What that means is that sites like Reddit can still make ad revenue, but only by filtering it through one of those players. That could mean using Google's ad server tech, or integration with Facebook's audience network, or whatever Verizon comes up with. But yes, most digital ad revenue currently flows through those few players and that will only accelerate. The true future of Reddit and other publications is as marketing vehicles to sell stuff directly to their readers/audience. Ads are basically just a stopgap along the way to content-driven commerce.
  - dcole2929 11y ago
    But doesn't that just seem unsustainable and like a recipe for disaster? In the example you mention Reddit the company is basically tieing it's entire existence to Google's adtech. If google suddenly decides it wants to come out with a competitor and shuts down Reddit's access to the adnetwork, the games over for them as a company. They have no ability to build 1-1 relationships with advertisers because they aren't one of the big players? This also seems like something ripe for abuse. You use Google's AdNetwork because it's the only way to access revenue for advertisements. But google can keep upping the cost of it and companies are left with no choice but to pay it or fold up shop. Maybe this is a good thing and companies shouldn't be relying on ad revenue. This is basically what I tell everyone who comes to me with a startup, mobile app idea. But at the same time, there are companies that provide real value that don't have a lot of other good avenues for revenue.
xiaoma 11y ago
>"Digital advertising is becoming a rather simple proposition: Facebook, Google, or don’t bother." This is true only for the worst marketers. Due to the law of shitty returns, the ROI of any given advertising channel declines over time as it gets saturated with more and more marketing competition. This both drives up prices for the marketer and desensitizes users to ads. Nobody gets the returns on facebook ad campaigns that were possible in 2010 or the returns on adsense campaigns that were possilbe in 2005. Today, if you want that kind of reach for your money, you're advertising on Pinterest, Vine or even Plenty of Fish. If all you use is Facebook and Google, you'll be bidding against a lot of others like you.
- adTechGuy 11y ago
  For performance marketers, sure. But lots of marketers are lazy or are big brand spenders just looking to do whatever gives them the most reach and the richest targeting they can sell to their boss. That spend is migrating from TV/Radio/Print to digital and once it goes digital it goes to Google/Facebook. There's always going to be new channels that open up and present short term opportunities. Those channels will get acquired or subsumed by Google/Facebook. That's what the next 4-6 years look like in terms of advertising.
- golergka 11y ago
  Most marketers are significantly bad.
- jondubois 11y ago
  Yes, that's what I wanted to say too. Perhaps LinkedIn's value of advertising is lower than that of Facebook, but it is still worth something. If the demand for ad slots drop on a particular network, the price of those slots will drop and this would attract marketers back to the ad network again. If anything, Facebook is in a worse position than LinkedIn when it comes to coping with an economic downturn. Financial crashes kill hype, not value. The article's pro-Facebook argument is centered around hype, not value.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >This is true only for the worst marketers. Worst in terms of return, but not all marketers care for return that much. Most just care for audience reach. At least you seldom see all the big lucrative accounts advertising in non mainstream channels.
mbrock 11y ago
Twitter is valuable in non-economic terms. Maybe it isn't a viable business. Then we'll build something else to chat on. Maybe it'll be hard to get Kanye and Bernie and everyone to all use the same thing. Too bad. Maybe the diversity will be interesting. I don't really enjoy Twitter that much lately. It got too big. The features made to appeal to the mainstream just make the core users feel unwelcome. I'll gladly use a more elitist Twitter. From my perspective there was a boom like 5 years ago when people really got to know each other on there; it was a kind of intimate setting, and kind of non-mainstream. Now it's just bleh. People are on there out of inertia. Or because they want to get famous.

147 points by rememberlenny 11y ago

petra 11y ago

So how will that affect the smaller sites (content , etc)? or they have already adapted to most such effects and there will be no change ?

rubidium 11y ago

I'm new this this, so help me out. If this is true (particularly the reference to advertising=1.27% of GDP) then an expectation of future revenue of all FaceGoog-advertising will be in the range of 1.27% x (GDP of US) x 50% of advertising market. This works out to 115 Billion per year. Google+FB's market combined current revenue is $93 Billion. Is that reasonable? If so, isn't FB's market cap a little silly?

benlower 11y ago
Why only 50% of the ad spend? I think the article makes the case that all ad spend is moving to digital. Probably not ever reaching 100% but a lot closer to 100 than to 50.
- rubidium 11y ago
  50% is a guess based more on the linked article that shows the internet share of advertising's growth rate is slowing down (http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-02-28/ADS_revenue-after-5-years.jpg http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-02-28/ADS_revenue-after-5-yea...). Also look at the linked graph from the 1.29% article: http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-02-28/ADS_medium_share2.jpg http://images.bwbx.io/cms/2014-02-28/ADS_medium_share2.jpg Each generation of advertising takes over more, but magazine, radio, are remarkably robust. TV will remain too (even if some transfers to Hulu/Netflix/etc...).
  - morgante 11y ago
    > 50% is a guess based more on the linked article that shows the internet share of advertising's growth rate is slowing down That's mostly due to the explosive growth of mobile, which it seems that graph leaves out.
wodenokoto 11y ago
Their valuation isn't based on monetizing the US market, but the entire world.
- rubidium 11y ago
  Ok, so that's a x4.2 difference. Of course, globally they face some stiffer competition.
  - mathattack 11y ago
    A couple thoughts: 1 - Market cap is (theoretically) the Net Present Value (NPV) of future cash flows. You have to be careful about comparing this NPV (discounting forever) with a 1 year slice. When interest rates are low, the future cash flows have a lot of value. 2 - Facebook's value is likely based on other things too. Advertising is just 1 way to monetize their users. Imagine hijacking all of voice communications as an example.
    - rubidium 11y ago
      Thanks, that is helpful additional info. So to summarize, the market value of facebook assumes 1) It becomes co-dominant web-advertiser with google in the US AND 2) It finds another way to make some money (either by other advertising markets OR other products/features that people pay for).
      - mr_luc 11y ago
        Which is pretty plausible, right? (Becoming co-dominant with google). The other thing to consider is the competitive/strategic landscape. It's not so much that the market 'assumes' that Facebook will invent new ways of making money, but rather that regardless of who figures it out, facebook is so incredibly well positioned at the moment (ubiquitous social network) as to give it a large competitive advantage, and let it eat other companies' lunch. The market has examples of other similarly well-positioned companies, like Microsoft in the early 90s, to draw on.
      - 11y ago
gnopgnip 11y ago
Revenue =/= market cap
morgante 11y ago
> Is that reasonable? If so, isn't FB's market cap a little silly? Facebook's market cap is $267.7B, which would be totally justified at $115B in revenue. Also keep in mind that the 1.27% is not fixed. Advertising has fluctuated as high as 2% of GDP, which leaves plenty of growth potential for Facebook and Google.
- rubidium 11y ago
  Yea, I agree if its revenue reaches $115B. I guess I question that happening if it has to share the pie with Google. But I see more now why it's valued as it is (I don't think it's silly).

nostrademons 11y ago

I would bet that the dominant form of advertising of the 21st century hasn't been invented yet. First off - take a look at the historical technologies he calls out in the post. Radio and TV didn't even exist yet at the height of the Gilded Age. The dominant media was newspapers (Pulitzer & Hearst, etc.), which ran a scaled up, largely self-service, mass-media form of the advertising which worked in the 19th century. Much like how Google/YouTube/Doubleclick, Facebook, and Craigslist run scaled up, personalized, carefully tracked forms of the advertising that worked in the 20th century. The concept of "brand advertising" at all didn't exist until the early 20th century. Why? Because "brands" as a concept were enabled by the technologies of mass production, mass consumption, and mass media. Before it becomes economical to spend millions of dollars building awareness, need to have an audience of millions of people with the disposable income to buy your product, and you need the capacity to make & distribute millions of them. The capacity to build them became available in the 1870s, the capacity to distribute them in the 1890s and 1900s - but the audience of millions of people who could afford them didn't happen until living wages started to become a thing in 1914, and it took a generation to spread throughout the population. I'll predict that the 21st century will see a trend to toward smaller firms, hyper-personalization, local manufacturing, and custom services over products, much as described in The Refragmentation [1]. The technologies of cheap solar energy, 3D printing, the Internet, self-driving transportation, and pervasive computing (beyond mobile - the wearable market will dwarf mobile to the same extent that mobile dwarfs PCs) will make it much more economical to build small production runs tailored tightly to individual preferences than mass-market consumer goods. The forms of advertising used to make people aware of these goods will shift as well, creating a new category on top of "brand" that is to brand advertising as brand is to coupons, but who knows what that ultimate form will be? If you can figure it out, it's probably a trillion-dollar market. I think that Etsy, Kickstarter, Yelp, LinkedIn, AirBnB, etc. are all harbingers of the type of company that will dominate the 21st century, but they're struggling now because they're early. People haven't yet let go of the old ways of thinking of social & economic organization, so they evaluate 21st-century business models in terms of 20th-century industries. Yelp and LinkedIn in particular are in trouble, because their customers are all embedded in old-economy value chains (local businesses, employment), and so they're in this weird position where their own business model assumes a networked, hyper-personalized world but their customers will disappear if that world comes to pass. It'll be interesting to see whether these first-generation marketplaces can hold on and prosper in a few decades, or whether they'll go under and be replaced by companies that build on their ideas but with new value chains. Historically, most of the first-movers in the industrial revolution died out, and the household names of the 20th century were large conglomerates formed by their carcasses. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html

hitekker 11y ago

I've heard the line that, for most startups, advertising is where business models go to die.

beat 11y ago
I saw a great presentation once that put a slide up with several well-known companies - Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. The presenter asked what business they're all in. The answer is advertising. Then he put up a slide with over 200 companies. What business are they all in? Advertising. Then he pointed out that advertising is only 2% of the GDP, and internet ads aren't even a majority of that. The point was to consider enterprise and medtech for startups instead, places where real businesses will pay real money for your products, rather than going out to find a million eyeballs and trying to sell them.
mej10 11y ago
If you have a lot of high quality page views (like at least 10M per month, more if they are low quality) and you don't have a business model, maybe consider advertising. At a CPM of $3.00, you could pull in 30k revenue per month. As long as you are seeing good user growth, you can build a decent business, but not an "up and to the right"-style startup. Otherwise the economics just don't work out, and it is a painful road.

tryitnow 11y ago

We're seeing the same consolidation that happens with any new industry. There used to be a hundreds of automobile manufacturers, eventually that shrunk to the Big Three in the US.

vdnkh 11y ago

I wonder how a future dominated by Facebook/Google advertisements will affect the multitude of adtech startups. They all aim to solve problems that the two giants air aiming to accomplish by gaining control of the whole funnel. Combined with the rise of adblockers, will there be enough money left?

hackercomplex 11y ago
Facebook is keeping a tight lid on their core metrics around how effective their mobile advertising platform is. IMHO nobody really knows yet how effective mobile advertising is in the large, we're still in the early days. It'll all come out in the wash over the next decade or two.
jkot 11y ago
My guess is that easy & reliable micro-payment system emerges.
adTechGuy 11y ago
AdTech companies are completely fucked. Just totally and utterly fucked. Google and Facebook are kicking their asses left and right. Google "worked with" 3rd parties for the better part of a decade while they improved on their products, but now they are working to muscle them out by taking their best products and blocking them to adtech companies. They took youtube inventory out of their Ad exchange last year. It cost them nothing to do so but crippled a handful of video ad companies and exposed them as powerless. Criteo has long been held up as an example of a company that managed to forge its own way, but eventually they've started running out of gas too. Their stock price has been tanking since last summer. It's not surprising either. Criteo's bread and butter are dynamic ads, which show specific products to retail shoppers. Well Facebook rolled out its own version of that and it's pretty tremendous. Criteo has to resell that product or lose relevance to its customers but now its just a reseller instead of providing the ad serving and inventory for its customers. This destroys its value proposition majorly.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dcole2929 11y ago

From a business perspective this makes a lot of sense. I have said time and time again that Facebook has absolutely deserved it's valuation (when a lot of others disagreed), and have made similar comments in regards to Snapchat. In short I'm a fan. That said, is a world in which all ad revenue is basically being filtered through 4 or 5 companies necessarily a good thing? There have been a few studies that have shown that millennials, and whatever there calling the generation after them are already largely immune to Ads. So isn't there likely a point in time as these generations become increasingly larger percentages of overall population when Ad Revenue starts to fall. If the people you want buying things in 15 years don't pay attention to ads what happens to the industry? And in the meantime if it's Facebook, Google, Verizon, Snapchat or nothing, what happens to all the other apps and webpages currently only surviving on meager Ad Revenue if advertisers abandon them wholesale? Can something like Reddit even exist when it makes very little money on it's own and can't subsidize with Ad revenue?

adTechGuy 11y ago
Something from your first paragraph answers the question in your second paragraph! Yes, all advertising will be filtered through Google, Facebook and someone like a Verizon (or whichever Telco can weaponize its data best, currently looking like Verizon). What that means is that sites like Reddit can still make ad revenue, but only by filtering it through one of those players. That could mean using Google's ad server tech, or integration with Facebook's audience network, or whatever Verizon comes up with. But yes, most digital ad revenue currently flows through those few players and that will only accelerate. The true future of Reddit and other publications is as marketing vehicles to sell stuff directly to their readers/audience. Ads are basically just a stopgap along the way to content-driven commerce.
- dcole2929 11y ago
  But doesn't that just seem unsustainable and like a recipe for disaster? In the example you mention Reddit the company is basically tieing it's entire existence to Google's adtech. If google suddenly decides it wants to come out with a competitor and shuts down Reddit's access to the adnetwork, the games over for them as a company. They have no ability to build 1-1 relationships with advertisers because they aren't one of the big players? This also seems like something ripe for abuse. You use Google's AdNetwork because it's the only way to access revenue for advertisements. But google can keep upping the cost of it and companies are left with no choice but to pay it or fold up shop. Maybe this is a good thing and companies shouldn't be relying on ad revenue. This is basically what I tell everyone who comes to me with a startup, mobile app idea. But at the same time, there are companies that provide real value that don't have a lot of other good avenues for revenue.

xiaoma 11y ago

>"Digital advertising is becoming a rather simple proposition: Facebook, Google, or don’t bother." This is true only for the worst marketers. Due to the law of shitty returns, the ROI of any given advertising channel declines over time as it gets saturated with more and more marketing competition. This both drives up prices for the marketer and desensitizes users to ads. Nobody gets the returns on facebook ad campaigns that were possible in 2010 or the returns on adsense campaigns that were possilbe in 2005. Today, if you want that kind of reach for your money, you're advertising on Pinterest, Vine or even Plenty of Fish. If all you use is Facebook and Google, you'll be bidding against a lot of others like you.

adTechGuy 11y ago
For performance marketers, sure. But lots of marketers are lazy or are big brand spenders just looking to do whatever gives them the most reach and the richest targeting they can sell to their boss. That spend is migrating from TV/Radio/Print to digital and once it goes digital it goes to Google/Facebook. There's always going to be new channels that open up and present short term opportunities. Those channels will get acquired or subsumed by Google/Facebook. That's what the next 4-6 years look like in terms of advertising.
golergka 11y ago
Most marketers are significantly bad.
jondubois 11y ago
Yes, that's what I wanted to say too. Perhaps LinkedIn's value of advertising is lower than that of Facebook, but it is still worth something. If the demand for ad slots drop on a particular network, the price of those slots will drop and this would attract marketers back to the ad network again. If anything, Facebook is in a worse position than LinkedIn when it comes to coping with an economic downturn. Financial crashes kill hype, not value. The article's pro-Facebook argument is centered around hype, not value.
coldtea 11y ago
>This is true only for the worst marketers. Worst in terms of return, but not all marketers care for return that much. Most just care for audience reach. At least you seldom see all the big lucrative accounts advertising in non mainstream channels.

mbrock 11y ago

Twitter is valuable in non-economic terms. Maybe it isn't a viable business. Then we'll build something else to chat on. Maybe it'll be hard to get Kanye and Bernie and everyone to all use the same thing. Too bad. Maybe the diversity will be interesting. I don't really enjoy Twitter that much lately. It got too big. The features made to appeal to the mainstream just make the core users feel unwelcome. I'll gladly use a more elitist Twitter. From my perspective there was a boom like 5 years ago when people really got to know each other on there; it was a kind of intimate setting, and kind of non-mainstream. Now it's just bleh. People are on there out of inertia. Or because they want to get famous.