5 ms·

Facebook’s business model

95 points by lleims 14y ago

ojbyrne 14y ago
Socializing with friends can sometimes include mentions of purchasing intent.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
Facebook Credits are just sitting there. The need for micropayment infrastructure is just sitting over there. Hmmmmmmm. 30% ain't gonna cut it, though. They'll have to chop that down by an order of magnitude.
rometest 14y ago
i guess the display business model doesnot work well. we have already seen the case with yahoo. but facebook is in better position with all that user data.
kposehn 14y ago
I think it is quite obvious that Facebook has already succeeded; the only thing to be decided is to what degree. > Display ads generally hurt the user experience, and are also not very efficient at producing revenues. Agreed. I would differentiate FB ads from your normal banners however, due to the against-the-wall approach of most banner buys (from larger advertisers) and the much more target - and interactive - approach of FB ads. > Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. Very true, but this also brings a problem. There is much more money in creating demand vs. harvesting demand. In addition, by capturing users earlier in their decision process, an advertiser often cuts out later stages that may sap overall profit margin. I think that we really should not be comparing Paid Search at all with Facebook Ads - the two really are completely different. What we should compare is businesses like Yahoo! Display and AOL's Advertising.com - those are the ones running scared from this.
- mikeryan 14y ago
  Lets look at the short term since their IPO is around the corner. I think the short term metric is whether they're worth a 100B valuation. Q1 profits were $205M give them leeway (they did spend $300M cash on Instagram) say they have 1B in profits this year and their P/E when they go public will be ~100. That's indicates an extremely high growth company. Considering their profits are down this quarter and their growth rates are slowing I think Chris's point may be more of is Facebook worth as much as they say they are. I, personally, prefer to see them at a P/E of 40. I think this is a pretty mature company and their primary revenue growth is behind them. The real short term question for Facebook won't be whether they can continue to grow their user base (they're likely tapped out) but how well they can increase the revenues on the users they have.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    If we're going by likely ad revenues, I'd tend to agree, but a big unknown is the value of all that data, and their willingness to exploit it. Even if companies won't pay much more than they currently are to run display ads on Facebook, I would bet there are people who would pay a lot to get their hands on various pieces of that raw data.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - jcampbell1 14y ago
    I think your comment is spot on, but I see large opportunities for them to increase revenues in the near term. Contrary to popular belief, Facebook ads are not well targeted. The only thing you can target is profile data and some action data like "likes". That is weak because stated preferences are less valuable than revealed preferences. Their remarketing offerings are non-existant. For instance, I can't target people that have visited my site, and GM can't target people that have already searched and looked at the chevy equinox. I have bought about $5k of facebook ads, and they were not great. If I could remarket on facebook, I'd likely spend several thousand a month, and GM would spend a ton more than the $10M they recently cancelled. I honestly think I could re-work their ad platform, and double revenues over time without changing the product. Right now, on facebook I am seeing ads for generic stuff like cell phones, and clothing. On other sites on the internet, I am seeing ads with a special offer for a local gym that I was considering.
qq66 14y ago
Disregarding the incredible business opportunities that are available to Facebook (Credits, taxing Connect more broadly, targeted offers based on very detailed demographic profiles), the fact of the matter is that Facebook may be able to one day identify purchasing intent not only before Google, but before the user themselves identifies that intent. If Facebook knows that you recently got married, and that you just surfed over to a baby website (equipped with the "Like" button), you might be intending to have a child, even if you're not yet pregnant. They can start selling you a daily-deal on diapers before a kid exists to soil them.
- Jare 14y ago
  They will be selling me diapers while I'm socializing (!), not when I'm trying to buy diapers. It's just not very powerful.
  - qq66 14y ago
    You don't just socialize on Facebook. I listen to music on Spotify (tied up with Facebook), I read articles people post on Facebook, and most importantly, I visit hundreds of web pages with Facebook "Like" buttons which Facebook can use to build a profile of what I'm like even when I'm not on their site.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    What are you doing when you're at a baseball game? And yet there are plenty of ads there. Why? How do they work?
    - Drbble 14y ago
      Mostly brand awareness, which is famously inefficient and only works for products with extremely wide mass appeal, like Coke.
- ajross 14y ago
  Target already beat them to that model: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe... More seriously, what you say may be true, but that's a stretched definition of "purchasing intent". Google wins here not because they happen to get eyeballs of surfers interested in diapers, but because people actually use Google to find places to buy diapers. That's a tough nut to crack, and the point of the linked article. More generally: facebook has "eyeballs" and page views, but search providers have the people with their wallets already out.
narrator 14y ago
I got a great model for Facebook. Pay for privacy. You pay for privacy and they won't give your personal information out to anyone without a judicial warrant and will let you permanently delete information you post that you'd rather no one else see. Another privilege is to let you have multiple accounts under pseudonyms. However, offering these features is likely to cause damage to the naive belief that Facebook is actually private.
- samstave 14y ago
  Or, you know... just NOT have a facebook acount. Ever. (I have never had one, never plan to have one either)
  - modeless 14y ago
    Facebook is the new TV. Everyone loves to explain how they don't use it.
    - samstave 14y ago
      Agreed - I am also fully anti TV. I just got cable again last week as I moved and my wife really wanted it. I have not had cable TV service for 9 years. Previously I taught her how to watch everything she wanted online. As someone who has been on a computer daily since 3rd grade (I am 37 years old) - websites are simply the new channels we debate over liking (no pun intended).
- rudiger 14y ago
  > I got a great model for Facebook. No, you don't.
  - dsrguru 14y ago
    narrator was being facetious.
- codeka 14y ago
  I don't see how that's even possible. As soon as you start adding friends and "liking" things, there's no way to do that and be "private".
SeckinJohn 14y ago
what about social adsense? also, don't forget that 90% of the ads budget is spent on creating intent not satisfying it.
Madintelligence 14y ago
One direction I could see Facebook going is becoming a proxy for real life. While it already contains all social transactions, evolving that idea into a platform for purchases that is simpler to use than Amazon or Ebay (and the respective company websites) means that they have a ready made audience, with social information to target specific purchases rather than just advertisements.
throwaway63-90 14y ago
This is a reasonably good blog post, especially the part about Google. However the title is inaccurate. It should be "Facebook's lack of a business model"
- tmuir 14y ago
  It could also be titled "A summary of the GM/Facebook article's HN comments from earlier today"
  - throwaway63-90 14y ago
    I like it. Much better than my suggestion.
btian 14y ago
Does anymore still use the Internet without AdBlock?
throwaway63-90 14y ago
Google found a business model that works (keyword advertising) before they went public. Facebook still does not have a business model that works. Facebook is surviving on investment, not income. Mark Zuckerberg is billionaire because of Microsoft's and others' investments, not because Facebook is making billions in income.
- qq66 14y ago
  "Facebook is surviving on investment, not income." Better check your facts. Facebook made a $1 billion profit last year.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - veridies 14y ago
    Yeah, but off of overpriced ad revenue with relatively low profit to the purchasers. It's very likely because of how popular and new Facebook is that companies are trying to figure out whether they can use it effectively. But the novelty factor won't last forever.
johnnyjustice 14y ago
I don't understand why facebook doesn't charge to have a fan page. I mean this is something that I think that you should absolutely charge for.
- slig 14y ago
  Maybe because pages gives them fresh content and visibility for free?
Steko 14y ago
"Display ads" are not simply an "old internet business model" they are the foundation of all advertising. So really Facebook lacks a business model the same way the trillion dollar tv and print industries lack business models. The whole point of Facebook is to get users to spend all their time online there. At that point Facebook's business model can approximate any and all other web companies business models. Facebook's Search will be keyword based and charge Google-like rates per pageview. Facebook's app and content delivery platforms will take Apple/Netflix/Spotify sized cuts.
McKittrick 14y ago
The effectiveness of an ad should be measured by its price - or conversely stated, by the revenue it generates. Search advertising generates somewhere between $50 to $100 for every thousand impressions (RPM) for US traffic. Content/ display ads on a well optimized site will generate somewhere between $1 and $3 RPM. FB ads, according to their numbers, generate around $.35 RPM. So in the advertisers mind, search ads are literally orders of magnitude more effective than FB ads. W/r/t FB as a business however, it's all well and good becuase, even at $.35 RPM, with billions of page views /day or month, the numbers start adding up pretty quickly. As long as they continue to crank billions of page views, justoptimizing the site to move from $.35 to, say, $.40 RPM will have a massive effect on the growth...provided they keep cranking the page views.
jv22222 14y ago
One way facebook could monetize would be to build/buy a system like skype and fully integrate a telecoms offering. It makes sense since the whole thing is about keeping friends in touch.
- joering2 14y ago
  Thats actually an awesome idea! the FB phone rumors were around for a while, then died. I guess FB realized everyone already has IOS/Android device... but they never seemed to pat into video a right way, just yet. if there is none already, somebody could build a skype-type iPhone app to talk/videochat only with your FB connections. If that gets traction, it may be bought by FB, given they wont shut down the API connection. Wish I would know Cocoa...
funflow 14y ago
Google took business from The advertising business. Facebook is drying a different old business: communications
yonasb 14y ago
Totally agree with this post. If they're going to build a long-term business, they need another model. The fact that they are now allowing developers to offer paid apps hints towards where they may be headed. Although, I don't see myself ever paying for a fb app
wolframarnold 14y ago
It's fascinating to me that nobody has commented on the last few sentences of the article. To me this is where the real juice lies: > A more likely outcome is that Facebook uses their assets – a vast number of extremely engaged users, it’s social graph, Facebook Connect –to monetize through another business model. If they do that, the company is probably worth a lot more than the expected $100B IPO valuation. If they don’t, it’s probably worth a lot less. So long Facebook is a "nice-to-have" business models around paying for access or privacy are dead on arrival, users will just leave or go elsewhere. However if Facebook becomes a "must-have" in order to participate in society, then people will do whatever it takes. If Facebook is becoming an infrastructure provider then they have every incentive to encourage a rich ecosystem and businesses will pay for access, even consumers perhaps might. The comparison that comes back to me is the early phone system from 100 years ago. It was a "nice-to-have" to have a phone number. But phone companies invested in infrastructure and interoperability and lots of third party applications emerged that got deeply embedded into societal life. Thereby the telephone became a "must-have". Facebook today seems to have a similar opportunity in front of it. If they realize and leverage it, it could be huge.
- simondlr 14y ago
  Absolutely agree. Their social graph is their most important asset. It's a goldmine for any service. For the most part, it is the best indication out there of who you are connected to. So many sites and services are using this 'trust' network to provide services that weren't capable before. An example is a travel site (forgot the name now) that allows you to see if friends of friends are staying over at a hostel on a certain date. They somehow have to monetise this.
rplnt 14y ago
> Facebook makes about 1/10th of Google’s revenues even though they have 2x the pageviews. I somehow don't believe that Facebook shows ads on 2x as much pages than google. If it's really only about pageviews then it's highly irrelevant as Google serves majority of its ads outside of their pages.
gfodor 14y ago
It seems pretty obvious to me how Facebook is going to end up printing money. We already got a preview with Zynga. Display ads are a red herring and just there to keep the company profitable while the master plan is rolling into place. Eventually that ponzi scheme will bottom out but by that point it won't matter anymore. (Though FB might be cheap for a quarter after it does!) Zuckerberg's thesis is that eventually all software is going to be social by default. Does social just mean "it has my friend graph?" No. It means it has access to all of the things your friends are doing right now and ever. And it also means it has access to all physical and virtual entities connected to you. The music you've played, the photos you've viewed, the videos you've watched, tracking all these things are possible today. In the future it will mean every little thing you do is getting logged by a big server in the sky. The places you go, the conversations you have, the things you look at, touch, smell, and taste. Facebook's goal is to be that server that all that data streams into. This is the reason that Google is shitting their pants trying to "iPhone" them by creating stuff like Google Glass, since unless they leapfrog them Facebook will be a large part of the "world's information" they cannot organize. It has nothing to do with search not being "social" (another red herring), it has to do with Google being left behind as Zuck spends 10 years rewriting the rules of the game, much like how Microsoft is suffering due to Steve Jobs doing the same. It's one thing for Facebook to make Google search obsolete somehow, its quite another for Facebook to make all software Google writes, now and in the future obsolete, which they are poised to do. As for Microsoft, their investment into Facebook might be looked back upon as the smartest business transaction of the 21st century, if it gives them special privileges in building systems that are enabled by the data Facebook can give them. 2000-2010 might just end up being a "lost decade" for Microsoft, and they may yet come out ahead in the future of software in a way Google will be unable to. (And Amazon, as an aside, will be selling AWS pickaxes to everyone the whole time.) All apps of the future are going to either be connected to the pulse of this feed of information or they are not. The ones that are not will slowly but surely be replaced by those that are, since they will be not just inferior but essentially braindead. We are still in the playground stages of all of this since Zuckerberg is still plugging together the pieces. The stuff being built now is just scratching the surface since we don't know what we're doing and there are still gaps in the availability of this data. There is also a generational gap. Most people on HN cringe when they have to accept a Facebook dialog. Our younger siblings and kids will have opt-ed in to the big server in the sky in full, no holds barred, when they turn 13. By 18 it will be a distant memory that these choices were even made, and that they were choices in the first place. And by then they will be fully profiled by data mining algorithms, using software that knows them as well as their parents do (if not better.) And, for most software, opting out will mean the software basically doesn't work. Once we are there, Facebook is essentially going to be able to implement a tax, much like Microsoft did for many years. Its hard to imagine how they will be usurped if they manage to get to this point, as they will be more integrated into the fabric of our lives than any other business I can imagine. More than banking, more than the utility companies, more than any retailers wet dream. Even more than Google. They have a strong technical team and a young, visionary founder who has absolute control of the company. What could go wrong? Eventually we might see an anti-trust suit (think 2016-2017 time frame) but Google is doing its best to create the illusion of competition on that front. And, of course, Facebook still has (and will always have) a bus factor of 1, which can't be very reassuring to investors. If you step back and look on a 5, 10, 15 year window, though, you'll realize they are essentially unstoppable.
alastair 14y ago
It's interesting to note that 27% of Google's revenue comes from partner sites [1], aka Adsense on 3rd party sites, where the "purchasing intent" is not so clear. I personally think it's unlikely that Facebook will not launch an Adsense competitor at some point. Then there's Facebook credits with at least 200 million users [2], potential there to expand into off-site micro-payments, POS systems, etc. Or "Premium Features": advanced analytics, promoted posts, photo storage, etc The $100B valuation is reflective of the market's confidence in their potential, obviously. It's wise to be cautious, but I wouldn't write them off just yet. [1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings.... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-credits-2011-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-credits-2011-6
sparknlaunch12 14y ago
You just have to think that with all that personal information and large active audience spending a lot of time on Facebook that someone can print money. Surely they can create purchasing intent simply by working out what users want to buy next based on yet profiles. What about growing existing elements like events (meetup.com) and chat (Skype, hangouts). Feels by economies of size and scale Facebook has to create value.

95 points by lleims 14y ago

Socializing with friends can sometimes include mentions of purchasing intent.

Facebook Credits are just sitting there. The need for micropayment infrastructure is just sitting over there. Hmmmmmmm. 30% ain't gonna cut it, though. They'll have to chop that down by an order of magnitude.

rometest 14y ago

i guess the display business model doesnot work well. we have already seen the case with yahoo. but facebook is in better position with all that user data.

kposehn 14y ago

I think it is quite obvious that Facebook has already succeeded; the only thing to be decided is to what degree. > Display ads generally hurt the user experience, and are also not very efficient at producing revenues. Agreed. I would differentiate FB ads from your normal banners however, due to the against-the-wall approach of most banner buys (from larger advertisers) and the much more target - and interactive - approach of FB ads. > Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. Very true, but this also brings a problem. There is much more money in creating demand vs. harvesting demand. In addition, by capturing users earlier in their decision process, an advertiser often cuts out later stages that may sap overall profit margin. I think that we really should not be comparing Paid Search at all with Facebook Ads - the two really are completely different. What we should compare is businesses like Yahoo! Display and AOL's Advertising.com - those are the ones running scared from this.

mikeryan 14y ago
Lets look at the short term since their IPO is around the corner. I think the short term metric is whether they're worth a 100B valuation. Q1 profits were $205M give them leeway (they did spend $300M cash on Instagram) say they have 1B in profits this year and their P/E when they go public will be ~100. That's indicates an extremely high growth company. Considering their profits are down this quarter and their growth rates are slowing I think Chris's point may be more of is Facebook worth as much as they say they are. I, personally, prefer to see them at a P/E of 40. I think this is a pretty mature company and their primary revenue growth is behind them. The real short term question for Facebook won't be whether they can continue to grow their user base (they're likely tapped out) but how well they can increase the revenues on the users they have.
- _delirium 14y ago
  If we're going by likely ad revenues, I'd tend to agree, but a big unknown is the value of all that data, and their willingness to exploit it. Even if companies won't pay much more than they currently are to run display ads on Facebook, I would bet there are people who would pay a lot to get their hands on various pieces of that raw data.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- jcampbell1 14y ago
  I think your comment is spot on, but I see large opportunities for them to increase revenues in the near term. Contrary to popular belief, Facebook ads are not well targeted. The only thing you can target is profile data and some action data like "likes". That is weak because stated preferences are less valuable than revealed preferences. Their remarketing offerings are non-existant. For instance, I can't target people that have visited my site, and GM can't target people that have already searched and looked at the chevy equinox. I have bought about $5k of facebook ads, and they were not great. If I could remarket on facebook, I'd likely spend several thousand a month, and GM would spend a ton more than the $10M they recently cancelled. I honestly think I could re-work their ad platform, and double revenues over time without changing the product. Right now, on facebook I am seeing ads for generic stuff like cell phones, and clothing. On other sites on the internet, I am seeing ads with a special offer for a local gym that I was considering.

qq66 14y ago

Disregarding the incredible business opportunities that are available to Facebook (Credits, taxing Connect more broadly, targeted offers based on very detailed demographic profiles), the fact of the matter is that Facebook may be able to one day identify purchasing intent not only before Google, but before the user themselves identifies that intent. If Facebook knows that you recently got married, and that you just surfed over to a baby website (equipped with the "Like" button), you might be intending to have a child, even if you're not yet pregnant. They can start selling you a daily-deal on diapers before a kid exists to soil them.

Jare 14y ago
They will be selling me diapers while I'm socializing (!), not when I'm trying to buy diapers. It's just not very powerful.
- qq66 14y ago
  You don't just socialize on Facebook. I listen to music on Spotify (tied up with Facebook), I read articles people post on Facebook, and most importantly, I visit hundreds of web pages with Facebook "Like" buttons which Facebook can use to build a profile of what I'm like even when I'm not on their site.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  What are you doing when you're at a baseball game? And yet there are plenty of ads there. Why? How do they work?
  - Drbble 14y ago
    Mostly brand awareness, which is famously inefficient and only works for products with extremely wide mass appeal, like Coke.
ajross 14y ago
Target already beat them to that model: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe... More seriously, what you say may be true, but that's a stretched definition of "purchasing intent". Google wins here not because they happen to get eyeballs of surfers interested in diapers, but because people actually use Google to find places to buy diapers. That's a tough nut to crack, and the point of the linked article. More generally: facebook has "eyeballs" and page views, but search providers have the people with their wallets already out.

narrator 14y ago

I got a great model for Facebook. Pay for privacy. You pay for privacy and they won't give your personal information out to anyone without a judicial warrant and will let you permanently delete information you post that you'd rather no one else see. Another privilege is to let you have multiple accounts under pseudonyms. However, offering these features is likely to cause damage to the naive belief that Facebook is actually private.

samstave 14y ago
Or, you know... just NOT have a facebook acount. Ever. (I have never had one, never plan to have one either)
- modeless 14y ago
  Facebook is the new TV. Everyone loves to explain how they don't use it.
  - samstave 14y ago
    Agreed - I am also fully anti TV. I just got cable again last week as I moved and my wife really wanted it. I have not had cable TV service for 9 years. Previously I taught her how to watch everything she wanted online. As someone who has been on a computer daily since 3rd grade (I am 37 years old) - websites are simply the new channels we debate over liking (no pun intended).
rudiger 14y ago
> I got a great model for Facebook. No, you don't.
- dsrguru 14y ago
  narrator was being facetious.
codeka 14y ago
I don't see how that's even possible. As soon as you start adding friends and "liking" things, there's no way to do that and be "private".

SeckinJohn 14y ago

what about social adsense? also, don't forget that 90% of the ads budget is spent on creating intent not satisfying it.

Madintelligence 14y ago

One direction I could see Facebook going is becoming a proxy for real life. While it already contains all social transactions, evolving that idea into a platform for purchases that is simpler to use than Amazon or Ebay (and the respective company websites) means that they have a ready made audience, with social information to target specific purchases rather than just advertisements.

throwaway63-90 14y ago

This is a reasonably good blog post, especially the part about Google. However the title is inaccurate. It should be "Facebook's lack of a business model"

tmuir 14y ago
It could also be titled "A summary of the GM/Facebook article's HN comments from earlier today"
- throwaway63-90 14y ago
  I like it. Much better than my suggestion.

btian 14y ago

Does anymore still use the Internet without AdBlock?

throwaway63-90 14y ago

Google found a business model that works (keyword advertising) before they went public. Facebook still does not have a business model that works. Facebook is surviving on investment, not income. Mark Zuckerberg is billionaire because of Microsoft's and others' investments, not because Facebook is making billions in income.

qq66 14y ago
"Facebook is surviving on investment, not income." Better check your facts. Facebook made a $1 billion profit last year.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- veridies 14y ago
  Yeah, but off of overpriced ad revenue with relatively low profit to the purchasers. It's very likely because of how popular and new Facebook is that companies are trying to figure out whether they can use it effectively. But the novelty factor won't last forever.

johnnyjustice 14y ago

I don't understand why facebook doesn't charge to have a fan page. I mean this is something that I think that you should absolutely charge for.

slig 14y ago
Maybe because pages gives them fresh content and visibility for free?

Steko 14y ago

"Display ads" are not simply an "old internet business model" they are the foundation of all advertising. So really Facebook lacks a business model the same way the trillion dollar tv and print industries lack business models. The whole point of Facebook is to get users to spend all their time online there. At that point Facebook's business model can approximate any and all other web companies business models. Facebook's Search will be keyword based and charge Google-like rates per pageview. Facebook's app and content delivery platforms will take Apple/Netflix/Spotify sized cuts.

McKittrick 14y ago

The effectiveness of an ad should be measured by its price - or conversely stated, by the revenue it generates. Search advertising generates somewhere between $50 to $100 for every thousand impressions (RPM) for US traffic. Content/ display ads on a well optimized site will generate somewhere between $1 and $3 RPM. FB ads, according to their numbers, generate around $.35 RPM. So in the advertisers mind, search ads are literally orders of magnitude more effective than FB ads. W/r/t FB as a business however, it's all well and good becuase, even at $.35 RPM, with billions of page views /day or month, the numbers start adding up pretty quickly. As long as they continue to crank billions of page views, justoptimizing the site to move from $.35 to, say, $.40 RPM will have a massive effect on the growth...provided they keep cranking the page views.

jv22222 14y ago

One way facebook could monetize would be to build/buy a system like skype and fully integrate a telecoms offering. It makes sense since the whole thing is about keeping friends in touch.

joering2 14y ago
Thats actually an awesome idea! the FB phone rumors were around for a while, then died. I guess FB realized everyone already has IOS/Android device... but they never seemed to pat into video a right way, just yet. if there is none already, somebody could build a skype-type iPhone app to talk/videochat only with your FB connections. If that gets traction, it may be bought by FB, given they wont shut down the API connection. Wish I would know Cocoa...

funflow 14y ago

Google took business from The advertising business. Facebook is drying a different old business: communications

yonasb 14y ago

Totally agree with this post. If they're going to build a long-term business, they need another model. The fact that they are now allowing developers to offer paid apps hints towards where they may be headed. Although, I don't see myself ever paying for a fb app

wolframarnold 14y ago

It's fascinating to me that nobody has commented on the last few sentences of the article. To me this is where the real juice lies: > A more likely outcome is that Facebook uses their assets – a vast number of extremely engaged users, it’s social graph, Facebook Connect –to monetize through another business model. If they do that, the company is probably worth a lot more than the expected $100B IPO valuation. If they don’t, it’s probably worth a lot less. So long Facebook is a "nice-to-have" business models around paying for access or privacy are dead on arrival, users will just leave or go elsewhere. However if Facebook becomes a "must-have" in order to participate in society, then people will do whatever it takes. If Facebook is becoming an infrastructure provider then they have every incentive to encourage a rich ecosystem and businesses will pay for access, even consumers perhaps might. The comparison that comes back to me is the early phone system from 100 years ago. It was a "nice-to-have" to have a phone number. But phone companies invested in infrastructure and interoperability and lots of third party applications emerged that got deeply embedded into societal life. Thereby the telephone became a "must-have". Facebook today seems to have a similar opportunity in front of it. If they realize and leverage it, it could be huge.

simondlr 14y ago
Absolutely agree. Their social graph is their most important asset. It's a goldmine for any service. For the most part, it is the best indication out there of who you are connected to. So many sites and services are using this 'trust' network to provide services that weren't capable before. An example is a travel site (forgot the name now) that allows you to see if friends of friends are staying over at a hostel on a certain date. They somehow have to monetise this.

rplnt 14y ago

> Facebook makes about 1/10th of Google’s revenues even though they have 2x the pageviews. I somehow don't believe that Facebook shows ads on 2x as much pages than google. If it's really only about pageviews then it's highly irrelevant as Google serves majority of its ads outside of their pages.

gfodor 14y ago

It seems pretty obvious to me how Facebook is going to end up printing money. We already got a preview with Zynga. Display ads are a red herring and just there to keep the company profitable while the master plan is rolling into place. Eventually that ponzi scheme will bottom out but by that point it won't matter anymore. (Though FB might be cheap for a quarter after it does!) Zuckerberg's thesis is that eventually all software is going to be social by default. Does social just mean "it has my friend graph?" No. It means it has access to all of the things your friends are doing right now and ever. And it also means it has access to all physical and virtual entities connected to you. The music you've played, the photos you've viewed, the videos you've watched, tracking all these things are possible today. In the future it will mean every little thing you do is getting logged by a big server in the sky. The places you go, the conversations you have, the things you look at, touch, smell, and taste. Facebook's goal is to be that server that all that data streams into. This is the reason that Google is shitting their pants trying to "iPhone" them by creating stuff like Google Glass, since unless they leapfrog them Facebook will be a large part of the "world's information" they cannot organize. It has nothing to do with search not being "social" (another red herring), it has to do with Google being left behind as Zuck spends 10 years rewriting the rules of the game, much like how Microsoft is suffering due to Steve Jobs doing the same. It's one thing for Facebook to make Google search obsolete somehow, its quite another for Facebook to make all software Google writes, now and in the future obsolete, which they are poised to do. As for Microsoft, their investment into Facebook might be looked back upon as the smartest business transaction of the 21st century, if it gives them special privileges in building systems that are enabled by the data Facebook can give them. 2000-2010 might just end up being a "lost decade" for Microsoft, and they may yet come out ahead in the future of software in a way Google will be unable to. (And Amazon, as an aside, will be selling AWS pickaxes to everyone the whole time.) All apps of the future are going to either be connected to the pulse of this feed of information or they are not. The ones that are not will slowly but surely be replaced by those that are, since they will be not just inferior but essentially braindead. We are still in the playground stages of all of this since Zuckerberg is still plugging together the pieces. The stuff being built now is just scratching the surface since we don't know what we're doing and there are still gaps in the availability of this data. There is also a generational gap. Most people on HN cringe when they have to accept a Facebook dialog. Our younger siblings and kids will have opt-ed in to the big server in the sky in full, no holds barred, when they turn 13. By 18 it will be a distant memory that these choices were even made, and that they were choices in the first place. And by then they will be fully profiled by data mining algorithms, using software that knows them as well as their parents do (if not better.) And, for most software, opting out will mean the software basically doesn't work. Once we are there, Facebook is essentially going to be able to implement a tax, much like Microsoft did for many years. Its hard to imagine how they will be usurped if they manage to get to this point, as they will be more integrated into the fabric of our lives than any other business I can imagine. More than banking, more than the utility companies, more than any retailers wet dream. Even more than Google. They have a strong technical team and a young, visionary founder who has absolute control of the company. What could go wrong? Eventually we might see an anti-trust suit (think 2016-2017 time frame) but Google is doing its best to create the illusion of competition on that front. And, of course, Facebook still has (and will always have) a bus factor of 1, which can't be very reassuring to investors. If you step back and look on a 5, 10, 15 year window, though, you'll realize they are essentially unstoppable.

alastair 14y ago

It's interesting to note that 27% of Google's revenue comes from partner sites [1], aka Adsense on 3rd party sites, where the "purchasing intent" is not so clear. I personally think it's unlikely that Facebook will not launch an Adsense competitor at some point. Then there's Facebook credits with at least 200 million users [2], potential there to expand into off-site micro-payments, POS systems, etc. Or "Premium Features": advanced analytics, promoted posts, photo storage, etc The $100B valuation is reflective of the market's confidence in their potential, obviously. It's wise to be cautious, but I wouldn't write them off just yet. [1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings.... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-credits-2011-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-credits-2011-6

sparknlaunch12 14y ago

You just have to think that with all that personal information and large active audience spending a lot of time on Facebook that someone can print money. Surely they can create purchasing intent simply by working out what users want to buy next based on yet profiles. What about growing existing elements like events (meetup.com) and chat (Skype, hangouts). Feels by economies of size and scale Facebook has to create value.