5 ms·

What if Facebook isn’t so special after all?

47 points by ssclafani 15y ago

stevenj 15y ago
If Facebook isn't special, the startup industry will be adversely effected. (I think Facebook's special. I think it'll be alive and well 20 years from now.) Edit: as it's often said, venture capital relies on home runs. If the biggest home run of all (Facebook) turns out to be a foul ball, and then an out, I think venture capital will contract; especially consumer tech. (Again, I think Facebook will be fine in the long-run, provided Zuck stays its CEO.)
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  Just for perspective, Yahoo is 17 years old. Infer from that what you will.
  - cannuk 15y ago
    This is a good point and relates to what Stevenj said "As long as Mark Zuckerberg is CEO". I would add to that "and as long as he, and his collective team maintain the vision". Yahoo, over the years suffered from both of these missteps. Apple did to, and then the vision came back. We all know how that turned out.
  - stevenj 15y ago
    What was/is Yahoo!? Was it a search engine? Was it a portal? Is it a news site? Is it a media site? Is it a portal? Is it a tech company? I think Facebook will always be a social network that's focused on building its core product(s) with good technical people.
    - hdctambien 15y ago
      Yahoo was a portal back when portals were the thing to be... until they weren't anymore. Facebook is a social network site when that's the thing to be... until it isn't anymore....
- ryandvm 15y ago
  I'm not so sure. I recall it being quite common five years ago for small businesses to advertise their web presence as http://myspace.com/FooBar http://myspace.com/FooBar. At the time I was completely disheartened for the future of the web. Of course you never see that anymore, and since then I don't feel that there are many tech companies that don't have to worry about a similarly precipitous fall from grace.
- Baba_Chaghaloo 15y ago
  It might be around in 20 years but I doubt it will ever be any more popular than it is now. It already seems pretty uncool (my grandma's on there but neither I nor any of my friends are) and it's gotten a pretty bad reputation, not many people are going to be too sad to see it replaced. Shouldn't discourage anyone from doing a web startup though, people are always going to want those sorts of social sharing sites, just maybe not that one.
- k-mcgrady 15y ago
  20 years ago most people didn't own computers and most people had never even heard the word 'internet'. Predicting Facebook will be alive and well is a crazy prediction. I can't even imagine what computing or the internet will look like in 20 years. Will we even visit websites? Or use apps? Or have info fed directly to our Google Glass(es)?
georgemcbay 15y ago
This is completely anecdotal and personally subjective and is only tangentially related to the topic, but today it dawned on me that Facebook now has an eerily 'myspace'-esque cesspool feel for me. I login less and less frequently and when I do I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of inane spammy "like this post so this poor child can get surgery" bullshit. I realize I have control over this stuff, but the amount of it is so overwhelming at this point that I can't be bothered to try to keep on top of it anymore. It feels like email pre-good-spam-filtering.
- untog 15y ago
  I've never seen a "like this post" entry in my news feed- perhaps because I only have 180 friends (a list I've never really needed to trim, but have been mindful of). I log into Facebook less as well, but because it's so ubiquitous that actually going to www.facebook.com and logging in feels like a rarity.
- k-mcgrady 15y ago
  That sounds like a problem with your friends, not Facebook. I have never seen one of those posts on Facebook. I see them all the time on Twitter as they are retweeted a lot. I have around 150 friends on Facebook, all of whom I now well 'in real life' and 90% of the content I see is interesting and relevant.
  - awakeasleep 15y ago
    You might be oversimplifying, because the same thing could have been said about MySpace. You said it may be a problem with the friends you chose, which is correct, but when a social net grows too large, real life social pressures start inducing you to include people who aren't interesting, and that has an overall negative effect on the network. So the choice end up being between manually filtering spam and snubbing people who you have to interact with on a daily basis.
    - k-mcgrady 15y ago
      That's a good point. I've kept my friend list down by actively not accepting all friend requests and it still astonishes me the reaction some people have when I 'reject' them. Particularly people I've only met once or twice. It also depends on the type of people you friend. For example very active internet users (especially geeks) are more likely to post links to tech stories, use the subscriber system etc. Most people I know keep everything private, don't share links (apart from the odd YouTube video), and only share interesting things about their lives.
mmurph211 15y ago
I think the problem Facebook has is once someone uses it for a few years there's a potential that they'll get sick of it. When someone gets sick of a site like Facebook they rarely if ever go back. Since it's a social network that results in a lot of lost value and degrades the experience for other users who may have friends leaving the site.
sek 15y ago
The basic problem in my opinion is they don't do anything special to differentiate themselves. Google Maps for example, not a big revenue point but they claimed leadership in web development trough it. Facebook has so many engineers and over they years they don't invest in anything else than their site. They have a Login system, that's nice but there are a dozen of services out there now. There is even an own protocol for that, OAuth what everybody can use. Did they even try something else? I don't see a real strategy, or vision in their current behavior. The like button was nice to get more data, but that doesn't seem to be the Golden Cow. The Ad's are not targeted at all, they only use the fact that i am male and single. The ad's are similar to porn sites ("Find hot woman now...."), who can also be really sure that their users are male and probably single.
- k-mcgrady 15y ago
  "The Ad's are not targeted at all" Have you ever run an ad on Facebook? The level of detail you can get into when targeting is incredible. Because people have liked places, added their location etc. you can target an ad at people who live in a specific city and like x. e.g. If I was selling tickets to a Foo Fighters concert in Toronto I could target the ad so only people who live in Toronto AND have liked the Foo Fighters page get shown the ad.
  - sek 15y ago
    This is my personal experience, obviously. Was your campaign successful? I heard bad things about return rates.
    - k-mcgrady 15y ago
      I've had mixed results. Sometimes it has worked but other times I think I've targeted to specifically at good poor results. As a Facebook user most of the ads I see are quite relevant. I think it depends on how many pages you've liked. I also close and mark ads that aren't relevant to me which might help. Right now it is showing me: - A HMTL5 course - A newly released album that interests me - A guitar player I might be interested in (I was) - A poker game & free chips offer (probably because I play Poker games on Facebook) - A tax ad as it is roughly tax time Admittedly there are also two that aren't at all relevant but considering the fact I never see relevant Google ads I think Facebook is doing a good job with ads. (I know this makes me sound like a Facebook evangelist, I promise I'm not :)
ctdonath 15y ago
Why is _growth_ so paramount? There comes a point where maintaining stability seems more sensible - and having a user base of 13% of the world's population sounds like such a point. Obsession with gathering new users becomes a matter of diminishing returns, but neglecting existing users can become an exponential problem (see MySpace). Keep current membership happy and engaged; long-term growth will follow. I remember some story about a goose and golden eggs...
- hexis 15y ago
  Growth is the concern of investors. They want multiples of their investment, and hence want the company to grow.
- bonafidehan 15y ago
  Growth is so important because that's the reason something is a good investment vehicle. You invest because you want to increase the amount of money you put in, not keep it the same. Bottom line, the article is talking about growth in revenue and income. The article outlines that growth can come by two ways: growth in the number of users and the growth in $/user. It claims that the former has little upside because of how large Facebook already is. It raises questions about the latter.
  - ArtB 15y ago
    Growth could be flat and if they paid dividends and stock price stayed flat as well I'd be perfectly happy to buy that stock.
    - damoncali 15y ago
      You would. But at a much lower price. Do the math on the profit per share of facebook - assuming they pay it all out in dividends. It's tiny.
  - awakeasleep 15y ago
    From what I've read, Facebook isn't really interested in cultivating investment. Look at the small float, and Mark Z's firm control of the company with over 50% ownership. In many ways, for the man on the street Facebook isn't a good investment. At the same time, it doesn't seem to be a goal of management to create a company that entices investors. See the line "we make money to create a better product, not create products to make money." Doesn't that say it all?
cannuk 15y ago
An interesting corollary to this piece would be to ask how much time and effort is Facebook putting into increasing the Average Revenue per User number? The collective mind of Facebook is smart. They have accomplished quite a bit and it would be foolish to think they didn't start planning for a plateau in growth years ago. It really depends on how they increase that ARPU (like somehow with mobile which they currently make no revenue from). I for one would not bet against them. This talk of Facebook not being cool anymore in my mind signals something different now. They are now in essence a utility (as someone else said ubiquitous) and that is a pretty incredible place to be.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  > (like somehow with mobile which they currently make no revenue from) That's not true. They are collecting data about you while you are on mobile and using it to feed their ad algorithms for when you are on desktop. Even if you are the super rare person who never uses Facebook from a browser, your data is useful because it influences what your friends see and click on, which influences advertising for them.
brd 15y ago
I think Facebook still has lots of opportunities even if its growth stagnates and its coolness has long since vanished. Considering their size, reach, and engagement its not unreasonable to think that Facebook could dramatically expand its ad offerings or attempt to create a new widely adopted e-currency/e-commerce solution. Either of these is definitely within their reach, the issue they currently have is that, although they have tons of user data, they have little in the way of user intent and without that they don't have any good ways to monetize their user base. If they can get at the intent, they have a gold mine. Whether they do that by getting involved directly in the transaction or by building a more ubiquitous ad network remains to be seen.
- sek 15y ago
  It's extremely difficult to create a new revenue stream as a big company. Facebook doesn't have a further scalable business model and i don't see them looking for a new one like Google does. Instagram was a defensive move, exactly the opposite.
  - brd 15y ago
    I agree with everything you've said except "doesn't have a further scalable business model". They've already created an advertising platform, they've already got hooks into websites all over the web, is there any reason they can't expand their ad network to compete directly with Google? I see nothing stopping them. Advertisers love the demographic information facebook has, they just can't leverage it appropriately with the limited advertisement offering facebook provides.
    - sek 15y ago
      Ad Sense is not the work horse at Google. I can look up how much percent it is from total revenue, but it is not that high. Edit: I looked it up, everything they call Google Network (probably Doubleclick, Youtube, AdSense) is less that half of what the search engine makes. It has also a lower margin i assume, i don't have Google shares otherwise i would know the details. If you think about what you said, competing directly with Google means having a better product.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
johnrob 15y ago
Facebook is an awesome company. Instagram is awesome too. But when someone buys a 13 person company with no revenue for a billion dollars, it means that some variable in some equation got corrupted. Most likely that variable was the 100B valuation of facebook.
- mikejsiegel 15y ago
  What about when someone buys a 65 person company with no (or close to no) revenue for $1.65 Billion? That's what GOOG did with YouTube, and YouTube should have at least $1 Billion in revenue this year. They got it cheap in retrospect.
ojr 15y ago
I like how facebook opensource ringmark (http://rng.io http://rng.io) something that is being moved into W3C , mobile will be better because of facebook, I "manage" with facebook because it shows how php can scale even though I am aware of hiphop that takes the php code and turns it into C++
tybris 15y ago
What if Facebook is now being used by nearly all Internet users? Should you expect it to keep growing? No. Is it bad for business? Hell no.

47 points by ssclafani 15y ago

If Facebook isn't special, the startup industry will be adversely effected. (I think Facebook's special. I think it'll be alive and well 20 years from now.) Edit: as it's often said, venture capital relies on home runs. If the biggest home run of all (Facebook) turns out to be a foul ball, and then an out, I think venture capital will contract; especially consumer tech. (Again, I think Facebook will be fine in the long-run, provided Zuck stays its CEO.)

jasonlotito 15y ago
Just for perspective, Yahoo is 17 years old. Infer from that what you will.
- cannuk 15y ago
  This is a good point and relates to what Stevenj said "As long as Mark Zuckerberg is CEO". I would add to that "and as long as he, and his collective team maintain the vision". Yahoo, over the years suffered from both of these missteps. Apple did to, and then the vision came back. We all know how that turned out.
- stevenj 15y ago
  What was/is Yahoo!? Was it a search engine? Was it a portal? Is it a news site? Is it a media site? Is it a portal? Is it a tech company? I think Facebook will always be a social network that's focused on building its core product(s) with good technical people.
  - hdctambien 15y ago
    Yahoo was a portal back when portals were the thing to be... until they weren't anymore. Facebook is a social network site when that's the thing to be... until it isn't anymore....
ryandvm 15y ago
I'm not so sure. I recall it being quite common five years ago for small businesses to advertise their web presence as http://myspace.com/FooBar http://myspace.com/FooBar. At the time I was completely disheartened for the future of the web. Of course you never see that anymore, and since then I don't feel that there are many tech companies that don't have to worry about a similarly precipitous fall from grace.
Baba_Chaghaloo 15y ago
It might be around in 20 years but I doubt it will ever be any more popular than it is now. It already seems pretty uncool (my grandma's on there but neither I nor any of my friends are) and it's gotten a pretty bad reputation, not many people are going to be too sad to see it replaced. Shouldn't discourage anyone from doing a web startup though, people are always going to want those sorts of social sharing sites, just maybe not that one.
k-mcgrady 15y ago
20 years ago most people didn't own computers and most people had never even heard the word 'internet'. Predicting Facebook will be alive and well is a crazy prediction. I can't even imagine what computing or the internet will look like in 20 years. Will we even visit websites? Or use apps? Or have info fed directly to our Google Glass(es)?

georgemcbay 15y ago

This is completely anecdotal and personally subjective and is only tangentially related to the topic, but today it dawned on me that Facebook now has an eerily 'myspace'-esque cesspool feel for me. I login less and less frequently and when I do I'm just overwhelmed by the amount of inane spammy "like this post so this poor child can get surgery" bullshit. I realize I have control over this stuff, but the amount of it is so overwhelming at this point that I can't be bothered to try to keep on top of it anymore. It feels like email pre-good-spam-filtering.

untog 15y ago
I've never seen a "like this post" entry in my news feed- perhaps because I only have 180 friends (a list I've never really needed to trim, but have been mindful of). I log into Facebook less as well, but because it's so ubiquitous that actually going to www.facebook.com and logging in feels like a rarity.
k-mcgrady 15y ago
That sounds like a problem with your friends, not Facebook. I have never seen one of those posts on Facebook. I see them all the time on Twitter as they are retweeted a lot. I have around 150 friends on Facebook, all of whom I now well 'in real life' and 90% of the content I see is interesting and relevant.
- awakeasleep 15y ago
  You might be oversimplifying, because the same thing could have been said about MySpace. You said it may be a problem with the friends you chose, which is correct, but when a social net grows too large, real life social pressures start inducing you to include people who aren't interesting, and that has an overall negative effect on the network. So the choice end up being between manually filtering spam and snubbing people who you have to interact with on a daily basis.
  - k-mcgrady 15y ago
    That's a good point. I've kept my friend list down by actively not accepting all friend requests and it still astonishes me the reaction some people have when I 'reject' them. Particularly people I've only met once or twice. It also depends on the type of people you friend. For example very active internet users (especially geeks) are more likely to post links to tech stories, use the subscriber system etc. Most people I know keep everything private, don't share links (apart from the odd YouTube video), and only share interesting things about their lives.

mmurph211 15y ago

I think the problem Facebook has is once someone uses it for a few years there's a potential that they'll get sick of it. When someone gets sick of a site like Facebook they rarely if ever go back. Since it's a social network that results in a lot of lost value and degrades the experience for other users who may have friends leaving the site.

sek 15y ago

The basic problem in my opinion is they don't do anything special to differentiate themselves. Google Maps for example, not a big revenue point but they claimed leadership in web development trough it. Facebook has so many engineers and over they years they don't invest in anything else than their site. They have a Login system, that's nice but there are a dozen of services out there now. There is even an own protocol for that, OAuth what everybody can use. Did they even try something else? I don't see a real strategy, or vision in their current behavior. The like button was nice to get more data, but that doesn't seem to be the Golden Cow. The Ad's are not targeted at all, they only use the fact that i am male and single. The ad's are similar to porn sites ("Find hot woman now...."), who can also be really sure that their users are male and probably single.

k-mcgrady 15y ago
"The Ad's are not targeted at all" Have you ever run an ad on Facebook? The level of detail you can get into when targeting is incredible. Because people have liked places, added their location etc. you can target an ad at people who live in a specific city and like x. e.g. If I was selling tickets to a Foo Fighters concert in Toronto I could target the ad so only people who live in Toronto AND have liked the Foo Fighters page get shown the ad.
- sek 15y ago
  This is my personal experience, obviously. Was your campaign successful? I heard bad things about return rates.
  - k-mcgrady 15y ago
    I've had mixed results. Sometimes it has worked but other times I think I've targeted to specifically at good poor results. As a Facebook user most of the ads I see are quite relevant. I think it depends on how many pages you've liked. I also close and mark ads that aren't relevant to me which might help. Right now it is showing me: - A HMTL5 course - A newly released album that interests me - A guitar player I might be interested in (I was) - A poker game & free chips offer (probably because I play Poker games on Facebook) - A tax ad as it is roughly tax time Admittedly there are also two that aren't at all relevant but considering the fact I never see relevant Google ads I think Facebook is doing a good job with ads. (I know this makes me sound like a Facebook evangelist, I promise I'm not :)

ctdonath 15y ago

Why is _growth_ so paramount? There comes a point where maintaining stability seems more sensible - and having a user base of 13% of the world's population sounds like such a point. Obsession with gathering new users becomes a matter of diminishing returns, but neglecting existing users can become an exponential problem (see MySpace). Keep current membership happy and engaged; long-term growth will follow. I remember some story about a goose and golden eggs...

hexis 15y ago
Growth is the concern of investors. They want multiples of their investment, and hence want the company to grow.
bonafidehan 15y ago
Growth is so important because that's the reason something is a good investment vehicle. You invest because you want to increase the amount of money you put in, not keep it the same. Bottom line, the article is talking about growth in revenue and income. The article outlines that growth can come by two ways: growth in the number of users and the growth in $/user. It claims that the former has little upside because of how large Facebook already is. It raises questions about the latter.
- ArtB 15y ago
  Growth could be flat and if they paid dividends and stock price stayed flat as well I'd be perfectly happy to buy that stock.
  - damoncali 15y ago
    You would. But at a much lower price. Do the math on the profit per share of facebook - assuming they pay it all out in dividends. It's tiny.
- awakeasleep 15y ago
  From what I've read, Facebook isn't really interested in cultivating investment. Look at the small float, and Mark Z's firm control of the company with over 50% ownership. In many ways, for the man on the street Facebook isn't a good investment. At the same time, it doesn't seem to be a goal of management to create a company that entices investors. See the line "we make money to create a better product, not create products to make money." Doesn't that say it all?

cannuk 15y ago

An interesting corollary to this piece would be to ask how much time and effort is Facebook putting into increasing the Average Revenue per User number? The collective mind of Facebook is smart. They have accomplished quite a bit and it would be foolish to think they didn't start planning for a plateau in growth years ago. It really depends on how they increase that ARPU (like somehow with mobile which they currently make no revenue from). I for one would not bet against them. This talk of Facebook not being cool anymore in my mind signals something different now. They are now in essence a utility (as someone else said ubiquitous) and that is a pretty incredible place to be.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
> (like somehow with mobile which they currently make no revenue from) That's not true. They are collecting data about you while you are on mobile and using it to feed their ad algorithms for when you are on desktop. Even if you are the super rare person who never uses Facebook from a browser, your data is useful because it influences what your friends see and click on, which influences advertising for them.

brd 15y ago

I think Facebook still has lots of opportunities even if its growth stagnates and its coolness has long since vanished. Considering their size, reach, and engagement its not unreasonable to think that Facebook could dramatically expand its ad offerings or attempt to create a new widely adopted e-currency/e-commerce solution. Either of these is definitely within their reach, the issue they currently have is that, although they have tons of user data, they have little in the way of user intent and without that they don't have any good ways to monetize their user base. If they can get at the intent, they have a gold mine. Whether they do that by getting involved directly in the transaction or by building a more ubiquitous ad network remains to be seen.

sek 15y ago
It's extremely difficult to create a new revenue stream as a big company. Facebook doesn't have a further scalable business model and i don't see them looking for a new one like Google does. Instagram was a defensive move, exactly the opposite.
- brd 15y ago
  I agree with everything you've said except "doesn't have a further scalable business model". They've already created an advertising platform, they've already got hooks into websites all over the web, is there any reason they can't expand their ad network to compete directly with Google? I see nothing stopping them. Advertisers love the demographic information facebook has, they just can't leverage it appropriately with the limited advertisement offering facebook provides.
  - sek 15y ago
    Ad Sense is not the work horse at Google. I can look up how much percent it is from total revenue, but it is not that high. Edit: I looked it up, everything they call Google Network (probably Doubleclick, Youtube, AdSense) is less that half of what the search engine makes. It has also a lower margin i assume, i don't have Google shares otherwise i would know the details. If you think about what you said, competing directly with Google means having a better product.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

johnrob 15y ago

Facebook is an awesome company. Instagram is awesome too. But when someone buys a 13 person company with no revenue for a billion dollars, it means that some variable in some equation got corrupted. Most likely that variable was the 100B valuation of facebook.

mikejsiegel 15y ago
What about when someone buys a 65 person company with no (or close to no) revenue for $1.65 Billion? That's what GOOG did with YouTube, and YouTube should have at least $1 Billion in revenue this year. They got it cheap in retrospect.

ojr 15y ago

I like how facebook opensource ringmark (http://rng.io http://rng.io) something that is being moved into W3C , mobile will be better because of facebook, I "manage" with facebook because it shows how php can scale even though I am aware of hiphop that takes the php code and turns it into C++

tybris 15y ago

What if Facebook is now being used by nearly all Internet users? Should you expect it to keep growing? No. Is it bad for business? Hell no.