Investors finally realizing Facebook has no clothes

http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/287629/investors-finally-realizing-facebook-has-no-clothes

by tech77 • 14 years ago

21 11 14 years ago

"Advertising effectively in the mobile experience" is basically Taps on a trumpet for the FaceBook app. I don't know anyone who actually enjoys using the existing app. It's clunky, poorly sorted, and extremely hard to navigate. Why does FaceBook want to make the experience even less enjoyable?

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

they should charge a monthly subscription for the mobile experience. like $2.99 a month or even $1.99 a month. If nobody pays it means Facebook provides thin, trivial value, and shouldn't deserve to be valued so high. It's the truth. Hey, can't have your cake and eat it too.

nicholassmith2• 14 years ago

I think it's fairly safe to say most people paying attention would have predicted this (obviously financial analysts aren't as cynically-savvy as us HN lurkers).

Is this bad news for Facebook? Sure, the company is getting a hammering in the press. Have they made out like filthy bandits from the IPO? Of course. They've sold enough shares to keep going for a long while, but unless they can find a truly innovate mobile strategy they'll burn cash like no ones business.

emmett• 14 years ago

You know Facebook is profitable right? Maybe not VERY profitable compared to other internet giants, but they made $1 billion in 2011.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebook-1-billion-profit/

nicholassmith2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I wasn't too much concerned about current profit, but more future profit. Mobile is sticky and increasing, if they can't get a profit stream off it they'll start burning cash on users they're not making much money on.

dfriedmn• 14 years ago

how about a non-ads business? they add a ton of value by serving as the identity provider for the web, but all they're monetizing is pageviews... you would think they could/should capture some of the value they create at some point.

talmand• 14 years ago

Are you saying they should charge websites to use their login with Facebook feature? Is that even worth paying for? I'm curious what the value in that is but I don't think I would pay Facebook for their branding on my pages.

mtjl79• 14 years ago

The problem I see is, Facebook ad's are never really going to be extremely lucrative. People don't search on Facebook. They want to play games and post stuff on their walls, looks at other peoples photos, etc. etc.

I think Facebook needs to seriously think how they can monetize aside from ads. Obviously with all those users and data, the possibilities are endless.

• Job boards and paid job postings • Get people to shop for stuff. • Subscriptions services: Dropbox style storage, who knows what else, etc. etc. • Get more local and offers deals. You know where a billion people live. • Offer business services for businesses pages. Upgrades, focus on ecommerce on business pages and charge for it. • + Who knows what else? They can be a million other things.

I just thought about this for 5 minutes, and I am sure people that actually work at Facebook have weeks, months and years to think about this. I have no idea why they aren't moving faster with this.

From what I see, they are all in on FB Ads, but that wasn't the way to go. Maybe it was the surest thing in the beginning, but now - they really need to step it up.

My 2 cents.

jsmcallister2• 14 years ago

Getting into the online dating scene would be a great money move for FaceBook. It's such a simple and obvious move that there must be something/someone internal that is preventing it. FaceBook has access to millions of people listed as "single", a large % of which are already using a pay-service like Match or eHarmony (which collectively boast around 35 million members).

capsule_toy• 14 years ago

My guess is it makes more sense to take products that can be monetized over as much as the user base as possible, and increase their efficacy than try to enter different verticals.

tptacek• 14 years ago

'tech77 is an ITworld bot account.

The way you know that is, this is a post from ITworld. Overwhelmingly, posts from ITworld only land on HN when they're posted by bot accounts. There's a long history of them.

I was under the impression that this was OK, but 'pg pointed out last week that he just hasn't gotten around to detecting and booting these accounts.

In the meantime, I'll help do it manually by flagging the story.

Investors finally realizing Facebook has no clothes

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