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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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that was their plan, but they can't now because they own Motorola. One of the US FCC's big firewalls (the only one, it seems, that they care to enforce anymore) is that a carrier cannot manufacture their own phones, essentially to prevent the kind of massive fail we saw in the 70s with AT&T.
As far as I can tell, Google's plan was to buy up massive amounts of darknet (already done), set themselves up as an ISP (pilot project in Topeka), and gobble up enough spectrum to make themselves a big player in mobile internet (T-mobile would make a good buy, and DT wants to sell). Unfortunately for us, the patent wars forced Google to look for a defensive portfolio, and Motorola leveraged their portfolio into forcing Google to buy them to get their patents (or else they'd all go to Microsoft/Apple; Motorola essentially held themselves hostage), so that dream is dead for now.
It may be possible for Google to spin the remains of Motorola back off as a separate manufacturer; they certainly don't seem very enamoured with the company, seeing as they're keeping the two businesses entirely separate in terms of management and workers, and aren't really even collaborating with them when making the new version of Android. Maybe they'll just shuck off the phone maker part of Motorola Mobility and continue on their grand plan; they've certainly got the free cash to pull something crazy like that.
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.
Keep in mind, that within 2 weeks GOOG was 20% lower the opening. And the seemed to survive that.
Yeah keep repeating that, and it might become accepted as truth at some point. Google opening price was $100. It never went below $100 (I think the least was 99.xx). Even more interesting was that the IPO price was $85. It never came close to the IPO price. The initial investors of Google IPO were happy from the begining. Facebook on the other hand, you know.
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...
This would mean the top spot would pay an order or two more for the placement on mobile. One more flaw in your argument is Google is not paid per ad impression. Google is paid only if the ad is clicked. Google can collect lot more information about you on mobile than desktop, and can accurately determine which ad you are likely to click (in a less sinister way, which ad you would like). So if they work it out right, they might end up make more revenue on mobile than desktop (even considering only search, and ignoring all ad supported apps on the market)