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Great points. And back forward! We did hear it last year; I reported it several times at Valleywag. Facebook has smaller profits, but the point of the small s
by NickDouglas 19y ago
Great points. And back forward!
We did hear it last year; I reported it several times at Valleywag.
Facebook has smaller profits, but the point of the small staff is that their personnel costs are also 100 times smaller than Google's. And yes, they could be making more money, great!
I haven't seen the falloff numbers either, so we both concede that point. Is MySpace's user base actually growing more than Facebook's? Anyway, like you said, Facebook's revenue could grow without growing the userbase.
Facebook is for fun, but more and more it's social in a useful way. That's why my 37-year-old media-minimogul boss is hooking up with VCs, bankers, and other rather influential people (ones not connected to Web 2.0!) on the site.
Side note: Facebook encourages users to track the activities through which they mediate relationships. They can share photos of their real-life interactions, join groups, etc; LinkedIn only has a limited version of this. So I can learn a lot more about my contact's connection to someone I want to meet through Facebook than through LinkedIn. "Anyone dumb enough to mix business with pleasure" is a lot of people. Hell, even Congress works that way, sadly.
I'm confident Facebook can compete in those other countries the way it does in the US: by being more "legit" and "safe" than Bebo, a MySpace-like group with little basis in real-world groups, and Orkut, heavily criticized in Brazil as a pedophile's haven thanks to Google's protection of "user privacy."
Safer being acquired? Ha, yeah, I'd feel safe with Yahoo's execs overseeing me, what with CEO Terry Semel barely keeping his job and two of the top three positions vacant. Facebook doesn't want to commit itself to Yahoo's disappointing ad system (the new Panama wasn't up to snuff); if he joined them it'd be after the company got over its midlife crisis.
It's in Facebook's best interests to mature on its own and partner with the big boys. The company's on a healthier trajectory than Yahoo and Microsoft (and Amazon and eBay, for what that counts), so it should stay under its own roof and play off their strengths without taking on their burdens.