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Dark Days Ahead For Facebook and Google?
An anonymous reader writes "Dallas Mavericks owner and media entrepreneur Mark Cuban thinks he knows the reason for Facebook's disappointing IPO; smart money has realized that 'mobile is going to crush Facebook', as the world's population increasingly accesses the Internet mostly through smartphones and tablets. Cuban notes that the limited screen real estate hampers the branding and ad placement that Google and Facebook are accustomed to when serving to desktop browsers, while phone plans typically have strict data limits, so subscribers won't necessarily take kindly to YouTube or other video ads. Forbes' Eric Jackson likewise sees a generational shift to mobile that will produce a new set of winners at the expense of Facebook and Google."
Flame baitin article is flame baitin.
It's too bad they don't make phone software or something that could help them pick up at least a little market share in that area, amirite?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...at the same time mobiles are able to establish higher rate connections, and it would probably make sense for Google to purchase a mobile phone operator or assist an one into providing much larger data limits than currently exists. Then the limits discussed above disappear and Google/Facebook resume letting the good times roll .....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Maybe the smart money recognized hype when they saw it and is starting to think that hype isn't a safe investment?
Rememeber MySpace? No? Vaguely, maybe? How about AOL? AOL isn't entirely in the same category but it's close. Facebook will go the way of the dinosaur just like AOL, and MySpace, and LiveJournal, and whatever comes after Facebook will sooner than you think Not Be The New Hotness anymore. What we're seeing with Facebook today is just the opening overture of it's swan-song, and I for one will not miss it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Facebook and Google should go the way of the dodo because in the long run users would benefit from controlling the means of communication. We should make the services on the internet free and open and decentralized and distributed or if there's a technical reason for central servage, the users should run those central servers.
Go Freedom! Go commons! Go opennes! Go democracy!
Peace.
One is the designer and developer of the most popular smartphone + tablet OS. The other has a garish social networking website.
Now which one do you think is better positioned to take advantage of mobile Internet users?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
A shift in usage from desktops to mobile will not take down Google; if anyone were in a position to embrace this sort of change, Google would be a top contender. As for Facebook, I would venture to say that it is reaching the end of its life-cycle.
How did Google get dragged into this? Google's main source of revenue is through ads and unlike Facebook, that includes mobile and video ads. Unlike Facebook, Google has a vast array of projects/services and is constantly developing new ones. Google is truly an innovative company willing to find the next great techonology. How can this be compared to a company that lets users add photos to a webpage to showboat about themselves or their family. Stick to baseball, Mr Cuban.
I will see your shenanigans and raise you 1 Bullshit. There's always some "expert" out there that can predict the future. Expert, Ex-spurt, Ex - someone who used to be something significant but is no longer. Spurt - drip under pressure.
I call your bullshit, but I don't have enough chips, I guess I'm all in.
I probably should have said something more insightful like, hmm, I didn't know facebook and google didn't work on mobile devices,
oh, wait, they do
In fact, I probably use google maps more on my iphone than on my desktop.
Smart money knows that no company in the world should be valued at $86 billion when its profits are just $1.8 billion.
Yes, mobile is important, but it's not some totally new paradigm. People do most of the same things on mobile that they do on desktops, and the difference is narrowing all of the time. It's true that facebook has been a bit slow to develop on mobile, but it hardly matters in the long run as they're not seeing any real competition in that space.
And yes, ad rates are lower for mobile (for now), but the user base is exploding, so revenue is still increasing.
TL;DR Mark Cuban is just throwing around buzz words to sound relevant.
Google has the most popular mobile operating system, and has working HUD glasses, I dont see how life is going to be difficult for them.
According to this article, Google is estimated to bring in $4 billion in mobile Ad revenue in 2012. Even if these estimates were off by (a generous) 25%, that still sounds like a lot of money. What exactly am I missing here that led the Forbes author to predict Google's demise? I must admit I don't know much about where Facebook stands in this regard.
Facebook is what people use their Smart Phones for! When Facebook needs a new revenue stream it can extract money from Verizon and AT&T for letting their users access it with mobile devices.
Simple grade 3 math explained why the shares went down. It's hard to justify that kind of multiple of earnings. Their income growth rate makes it unlikely it'll ever sustain that kind of value. It's got nothing to do with generational shifts to mobile.
Facebook is different than Google, very different. Facebook is one well developed web app, with remarkable popularity. Google is founded on the strengths of their search engine. Search is key, search is where you start. Search means you're looking for something, and susceptible to being introduced to something else that you might not have been looking for. Facebook is a tool, an application. Ads in applications diminish my experience with my application, ads in my tools make me not use said tool.
It's true he invested money into Real networks (anyone use RealPlayer lately? Thought not.)
Mark is a good example of the write once-read-many kind of things.
Sadly, everything he's ever touched has ended up on the back end of a donkey.
Real-networks. Sorry, glad you made your buck back, nobody uses it.
The Mavericks? Yes, they won... nothing.
HDnet? That's like the ONLY US HD TV network never to succeed in HD.
Mark Cuban is the Charlie Brown of kicking a good investment to the... whoops, /. mods - suck it.
Lucy just pulled it out from right under him.
E
Yahoo stupidly paid a couple billion to Cuban for a worthless website at the height of the dot-com boom.
Since then he has goofed around with sports teams and had a bunch of failed business ventures. Apparently on Slashdot this makes you a technology genius who's every blog post is front page material.
Kinda flies in the face of what Cuban said, doesn't it.
I disagree; it wouldn't matter if that number was 99% that are using it on mobile. The question is, is Facebook effectively monetizing those people, or are they just using the free service. If the latter, Facebook's goose may be cooked. Free is fun, but all those servers sure ain't free to Facebook.
Don't get me wrong, the forces that be, want desperately to make desktops go away... They can't be locked down or locked in the way mobile devices can be, and the people who use them well are unruly, demand their right and freedom, and typically don't play well with service providers walking all over them. So I understand the pundits claiming the PC is dead long live the mobile device!!!
The problem is that there's this peculiar thing. Its called a DISPLAY, and the one on a COMPUTER is just a wee bit larger than a hamster's cage mirror, sized display that passes for a screen on smartphones. I swear there will in 50 years be an entire generation of blind people dancing to their retro ringtones from devices long abandoned for the health problems. I personally want a great big, huge frigging display. One that won't make every person over 35 squint so hard, they look like they're doing a Clint Eastwood imitation. I want to see what I'm working on without having a microfilm reader's lens welded to my eyes. I like movies and art that fill my field of vision. I like lots of windows up so I can code, and debug, and document, and browse, and email, and edit pictures all at the same friggin time.
If the price of my great big display is that it sadly that leaves room for greedy clowns to slip advertisement into my field of view, so be it, I have to keep getting more creative to keep the stupid stuff out. This is a request for the world at large. Someone out there. Provide commercial media without commercials and people will gladly pay the premium. I would, in a heart beat!
I probably should have said something more insightful like, hmm, I didn't know facebook and google didn't work on mobile devices, oh, wait, they do In fact, I probably use google maps more on my iphone than on my desktop.
How much do you pay for using Google maps? Do you follow ads a lot? If the answer is that you don't pay anything to Google for your mobile maps, and you don't follow ads, then how is Google making money off you? The same observation applies to Facebook.
Heck, mobile users are monetized beyond what most people even think.
1: Look at all the apps sucking GPS info.
2: Carrier IQ, enough said.
3: Install FirewallIP on a jailbroken iPhone. Virtually almost every single app connects to a metric (versus an imperial) fuckton of ad, metric, behavior targeting, scoring, and other tracking sites.
4: You know the Enhanced caller ID info that is supposedly better than GPS? Nothing keeps that from being sold with YOUR name on it to whomever wants.
So, mobile is far worse than desktop in being tracked 24/7/365. At least you can anonymize a desktop. A mobile device will still whisper its GPS coords and has to use towers which uniquely identify it.
N, y wll mr lkly g bnkrpt. Bsds, th Hbrw lngg hs bn nvntd lrdy.
It makes sense if you realize Mark Cuban has a burr up his butt over Google.
At least, here I can get a mobile flat data plan for 15€/month. This would make Mark Cuban's point moot.
Also, iOS is the #1 tablet operating system, not Android.
Android is probably the #1 phone+tablet operating system, just as the OP said. No, not the number one tablet (by itself) OS. There's still a LOT more smartphones being sold than tablets, but the same OS is used on both, so Android's lesser share on the tablets is made up for by their numbers on the phones.
They view Facebook as a direct threat because Facebook has replaced email and the web for a lot of people.
How do you figure? Email, maybe for some dumb kids without jobs, but web? If I want to go read about some product, like a new car, or some specialty product, where am I going to go, to Facebook, or to that company's website? Obviously, the latter. What if I want to purchase a product online? Where am I going to go, to Facebook, or to Amazon or Newegg or some other online store? Obviously, the latter. The idea that people will conduct all their internet business on Facebook is utter idiocy. It's nothing more than a venue for people to hang out on and socialize. For that purpose, it's fine, I really don't have a problem with it, but the idea that it's a replacement for the general web or even for email is simply ridiculous. For a place to post something and have all your friends see it, it's really a fine idea; for a way to privately communicate some sensitive information with someone, you'd have to be a complete moron to use it.
then facebook came along. Where will the crowd head next ? I think that's the problem with facebook; no reason for people not to move on when something shinier and less profligate with privacy comes along in a few years.
Nullius in verba
I'm curious what exactly makes a user "active". I know so many people with Facebook accounts that abandoned them ages ago...they didn't go through the bullshit hassle of deleting the account, but they stopped logging in.
This is one of the reasons why I really wondered about Facebook's valuation being accurate or not. I know for a fact that I had multiple accounts (before I deleted them), so to FB, I was 3 separate people (work, play, and politics). I know many other people that have a work account and a personal account to keep their private lives private.
Based upon my own off-the-cuff observations in my circle of friends and family (obviously not scientific, but just for the sake of estimation) I would guess that 2/3, maybe 3/4, of the active users are actually real, individual people. When you're talking about 900 million "active users", that's 225-300 million bogus, worthless accounts. How would an advertiser know that they were targeting ads at real people and not an alternate account? How would they know that all their "likes" were legitimate potential customers and not someone just fucking around on a throwaway account they don't care about?
The mobile customers are probably legitimate, I'll grant that, because most people aren't going to tie a troll account to their mobile device. But that still leaves 450 million accounts that are very questionable in my opinion.
I know Facebook would never really release numbers on the numbers of people that have abandoned their service or the number of potentially duplicate/troll accounts because it's just negative publicity with no positive gain for FB in doing so, but it would be nice to know if I'm completely off my rocker or if I just happen to know an inordinate number of people that have multiple accounts.
Troll? Not only can you get your data out by the provided interfaces, but the backends are proddable with the development tools, and you can manually extract any data out of the databases that you like.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That sounds a lot like Google's business plan for their search engine. Give it away for free, and make ads dirt cheap. But get enough ads and all those tiny sums turn into huge piles of cash.
The point is that even IF Google continues to be the search engine of choice on Mobile (as it will on Android), they still make way less than they do on the desktop. Think of how much space on the desktop Google they devote to ads in the result. Now do a search on a mobile device - there is hardly any space left for ads anywhere after you display the results, perhaps one or two...
So that's an order of magnitude reduction in ad revenue for Facebook and Google, even IF they remain sole search provider...
But as we have seen from other past stories, Google being the primary search engine outside Android is possibly a thing that will pass. Already Siri acts as an intermediary that can pull results from things besides Google and certainly does not do advertising with Google. And I'm not just talking about Siri, if voice driving searches take off where does Google put the ads even if they are the ones doing the Siri like service on Android (it has something like it today).
Even if you think about desktops, increasingly people are using iPads or netbooks - and THOSE have smaller screens as well, so even with a desktop browser you cannot display as many ads.
All that is why it is hard to think that Facebook or Google can possibly maintain the revenue they enjoy now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
About 1/4 to 1/3 of the people I know who use facebook have more than one account. Of course I know a lot of strange people... so that might not strengthen the case for your estimate.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
One problem with the internet's growth is that some ISP's, namely AT&T, have started rationing their internet services, which makes it hard for small companies in rural areas to get anywhere but in the hole. Some of the net gets lagged down a good bit due to their lack of resources. It's definitely going to take a little expansion on the ISP's parts to keep things going. Some of the satellites they use are getting old, need repairs, etc. Could see some shortages if they aren't careful.
Facebook is too risque. I removed my page two days before the stock went public out of fear of being associated with a nasty company. It's known they monitored some SMS messages, and I figured it would be the right thing to do for various reasons. Then the cofounder denounced his American citizenship, and I knew I was right. Ya'll have a good one, I'm going to read a book instead. Sorry to troll though. I always have a lot to say.
Thanks Captain Obvious...nice to see you finally have a relevant opinion.
A smartphone with a REALLY big screen -- http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/80-inch-windows-8-tablets/ . Steve Ballmer thought of it. They are going to release a line of clothing that will allow you to carry it, too - http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/hulc.html .
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I don't follow ads on my PC when I'm driving either.
Rethinking email
I think the entire market is a sham. The smart users block every ad, tracking cookie and other marketing tool they possibly can, and I think everyone else mentally blocks they ads that do get placed on pages. I can't recall a SINGLE WEB AD, although I periodically scan my spam box for funny phishing emails or Nigerian scams.
Facebook is worth about $12 a share based on FUTURE potential. That is about it. But that is combined with the inherent risk of a product that could literally implode over night like MySpace or AOL.
Why would I care one whit if "Facebook and Google" are facing "dark days ahead"?
Are "Facebook and Google" supposed to be exempt from the overall decline and fall of Western Civilization? I mean, is anyone paying attention?
On my list of concerns about dark days ahead, Facebook and Google is some ways behind the massive die-off of bees and the Fall TV season.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... demand a simple answer: No!
Oh... and he lost me just by comparing Google to Facebook. That's just ignorance.
What then? Will Facebook make a comeback? Facebook is having a whole series of problems. One of them is privacy. Whenever I talk about Facebook I always mention Facebook owning the data and about the user having little to no control over his own data. The 16 year olds who first started using Facebook are now out of college and don't want the rest of the world, nor their employers, nor their adult friends and acquaintances to see their teenage angst and college pranks.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
is there some easy option to filter out the sponsored tweets?
The article mistake's Google's lack of direct revenue from Android with revenue of all the different products Google delivers over Android and other mobile OSs. The money-making parts of Google deliver apps to Android, iOS, and other mobile platforms, and make money from those apps.
Facebook has a greater challenge, and is off to a later start, but you have to ask if that's really a worry, compared with getting the mobile launch right. Facebook faces very little competition. Other than Google+, there are no social networks that have an in-house phone OS. The mobile Google+ app is among the least well-executed mobile apps among all of Google's products.
Amazon has shown it's possible to have a successful product entry with a mobile device, even with Android and iOS as competitors. Facebook has a large ecosystem, like Amazon. There is no reason to think Facebook's mobile market window is closing. On the other hand, if Facebook were to ship a "Kin"-like flop, that would set them back substantially.
If a Facebook mobile device is coming, Facebook has every incentive to wait until it is done right.
I wrote parts of this stuff
i guess your point is that it doesn't make a difference whether users are searching from an iphone or android, so android is meaningless.
android (and the chrome browser) are security. without control of the platform (the OS and the browser), google is at the whim of the owners of those things. without android, apple can cut a deal with MSFT tomorrow and lock google out of mobile search.
They suck at what they do but there are no other real choices so were stuck with them. Youtube: has no way to filter or sort videos you subscribe to so you end up with a bit pile of videos you have seen or arnt interested in piled in a poo pile. Facebook: has such odd ways of doign stuff that it greatly limits any real usefullness and lets not forget the randomly dissapearing facebook pages Google: has messed up their search profile with bias and predious that your better off starting a few pages into the search to get past googles bias and prejustice that end up not giving you the search you asked for. curtomer service NOT there becoming dinosaures and just like some car companies that fail to adapt they become extinct.
NO really ....1 out of hundreds why? its too damn expensive and ill add a home pc can do i dunno TONS more. they are better then xboxs for games...they can make phone calls , they can program and make games if i want to ....they can OMG lets be stupid oh wait the poster is american i forgot your math skills ratings im sorry carry on be stupid....
how many people do i know with a smart phone
1 out of hundreds? Um, this isn't 2001 anymore. When was the last time you were out of the basement?
Or do you live in a technological backwater?
I'd say the ratio is exactly the opposite, 1 out of hundreds still has a feature phone.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
They didn't stop using it. They just blocked you because they were tired of you asking them to be their farm neighbor.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I think that the cute icons on google maps that appears on some business are not for free.
Also the more people search in maps the more ads with geo extensions will worth.
Or Zagat property.
People used to say the same about search, there is no way to earn money out of it.
I think the road to maps money is the same.