Facebook Posts Strong Profit and Revenue Growth
wsj.com
wsj.com
They're still doing well. They bought Instagram. (I think a very smart move.) They'll eventually buy the next big thing.
I think Facebook is here to stay.
Unless the next big thing refuses to do so.
The big strength Facebook has now is very similar to Google's. They can rake in cash without having to spend a bunch of money to generate it. Unlike Apple they don't need to produce extremely polished and innovate hardware every single year.
Secondly it was very difficult for any other party to aggregate as many advertisers as Google had; Facebook pulled it off but it took a long time. Someone else may be able to do that too, but once virtually all ad revenue is digital there will be plenty of room for a third participant. There are other business models, but the ad revenue one allows companies to really laser focus on just growing and keeping their marketshare.
AI and post-mobile platforms are going to change things in ways investors aren't predicting. Facebook knows this and they certainly are demonstrating it, between wit.ai/messengers "bots" and Oculus. This larger generational shift may well open up gaps that directly threaten Google's core model more so than Facebook's.
Oh, wait...
They're pretty much drifting into irrelevance each passing day. But enough to fool some people into giving them money
Once you stop talking to developers and programmers, you find that people don't give a shit about things remotely technical, and just use stuff because 'everyone else is using it'.
Saying all that, these days my FB feed has gone advert mad, and I find I mainly use it for event organisation instead. I do get the feeling it is slowly dying though despite being profitable, but whether it will be replaced by a new social networking site, or a set of separate apps with specific functions instead, remains to be seen.
I know of several people who choose to not waste their time with Facebook. Seriously, why? Any time I need to nudge somebody, that I don't care enough to bother with in the real world, there is Linked In. Everybody else either has my phone number, email address, or they are people I don't know.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has-linked...
I just checked and the last thing I posted on my wall was a year ago. The thing before that 6 months before. Hardly a time sink.
MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, LiveJournal, Tsu, Yahoo! 360, StudiVZ and Xanga weren't terribly technical, and yet still under-performed. For a while Facebook's success story was how highly technical and performance-oriented it was when compared with Twitter's fail whales and MySpace's enter-URL-and-go-get-some-lunch-while-it's-loading site speed.
Very little effort went into ever evolving the user experience beyond a v1, the backend underpinning it all was legendarily bad, and there was no concept of ad personalization whatsoever.
MySpace kind of stumbled across Music as a product direction, and developed something that was a bit like an ahead of its time version of Soundcloud, but discovery was still horrible and by then people were migrating to Facebook anyway.
This created strong network effects, accelerated by seeding in universities (places with lots of friends).
The tech stuff allowed them to maintain their platform, it didn't differentiate the fundamental proposition.
You've just triggered a favorite quote of mine:
"The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems." - Heifetz & Linsky [1]
In this context, technical problems are not technical in the sense that we might think of (software/hardware bound), it's in fact any problem that can be solved with a certain process, given enough resources and time. However technically intimidating they might be, those problems are the easy ones. The hardest challenges however are not technical but adaptive in nature where one of the biggest hurdles is to convince people to change their behavior.
[1] A better summary: http://www.sgaumc.org/files/files_library/technical_vs_adapt...
I can confirm. My parents aren't technical at all. They were confused when I told them people work at Facebook.
What do those 15k do?
you mean like trying to cross a speeding-bus and breaking a leg?...
But it can be explained as:
- Development/Ops (the technical side, from developing the services, supporting those services to debugging network problems and support of API users, it's a huge area)
- Sales/Commercial affairs/Customer support
- Localization/Editorial production
- Growth/Product management/UX and everything that goes in designing the product
- Corporate support functions (HR/Legal etc)
Honestly, let's not give them that much credence, nor take them as any sort of proof that people don't care about privacy.
Diaspora was screwing up basics -- like, serving mixed HTTP content -- years into its development. Regardless of how it was marketed: Privacy first it was not.
I'm enjoying some parts of Ello now (yay! Markdown, embeds, and images), but also find it frustrating for long-lived fails: missing markdown entities (blockquotes), a very glitchy editor, and low-quality search.
Where's that Usenet discussion we were having a day or so back....
Well, that just sounds like an open invitation to challenge them.
I think they will learn and make things better for mankind, but they need to realise that just throwing mass-communication onto people won't fix things by itself.
"Release often, release early" is not good when it comes to emotional communication.
In my opinion Google is sacrificing their own search product[1] on the altar of staying alive looking for an answer that works. The challenge with that strategy is that a company that doesn't need search advertising to stay alive will have the freedom to compete with Google in terms of quality user experience.
One has to consider the question, what would the marginal cost of adding quality search to Facebook's infrastructure be? And what sort of margins would their search product need to return to support that? I can imagine a Facebook search product with the accuracy and reach of Google's but without the crappy pages that nobody really cares about anyway. With 15 - 30% margins instead of 80+% margins.
I remember watching IBM fade in the 1990's. It wasn't pretty and for as long as I could remember up to that point it had been the biggest fish in a very big market. The gorilla as some would say. I watched as an alliance of Microsoft and Intel decimated the retail business, Sun, HP, and later Dell decimated the server business. Nobody who mattered really thought IBM was dying or even threatened.
Google won by making Google a destination in every web browser, and Facebook is winning by making Facebook the destination on everyone's phone. And the desktop browsing experience is fading and fading.
Something will come along and derail Facebook but it won't be another social network. It will be something which changes a fundamental part of people behavior and interaction with their world.
[1] And to be clear it is creating a backlash by attempting to monetize so heavily the user experience is compromised as are the search results.
The challenge is that both Bing and Google give adequate results, and slowly over time Google has gotten more and more annoying when they detect I'm looking for something to buy (which really lights up the page with about 95% non-organic content). Bing is bad too but oddly, less bad.
There is a point where, like IBM and MySpace and any other market leaders get too far behind the margin curve, it results in a systemic collapse. That happens because the environment changes faster than management can change the company. I haven't figured out entirely what causes some companies to re-invent themselves (Dell, IBM) and others to become someone else's lawn ornament (Yahoo!, AOL).
[1] "they've made a few attempts at search over the years and none of them have really panned out so far." -- which is exactly the symptom of a cultural or organizational impediment.
[2] Bing is helping too of course.
About the only data I can think of that Google has is behavior on the search results page (which links people choose against a query, bounce rates), which is probably very important, but FB could eventually catch up.
FB actually already has a search engine, they just don't have a separate site for it. But it's there, front and center (well up and center) on their page. They can slowly tinker with it to make it more and more relevant. Until they reach a point where it beats Google and is worthy to promote it to the media (or skip the media, just promote it to their own userbase).
(But there's an important distinction: Google is not free to use that data in gmail they have.)
Wait, are you saying that if I write, "I love coffee" in Gmail, Google cannot use that to show me an advertisement for Starbucks in YouTube?
Working for Google, I do know that we have intense scrutiny and strong internal regulations for what one can do with customer data---and especially so with data that's private like emails or your browsing history.
From where I work in the company, the procedures and regulations are mostly concerned about <when not and when and perhaps how restricted> we can use customer data to reproduce and investigate bugs.
The data Facebook can use is mostly semi-public: posts on your wall that have varying but generally weak privacy expectations in the first place. Friend lists are probably totally fair game. (I don't know what Google does with G+ circles, but nobody is using G+ anyway.)
Anyway, all speculation apart from that there are pretty strong safeguards at Google.
(Google and even Facebook or Amazon etc treat your information much more carefully than probably almost any other place you put them. Eg most banks have incredible weak password protections, and my ISP is probably selling my postal address to spammers left-and-right.
The only reason to be afraid of what those giants do intentionally is that they are actually competent, and will do the best they can in the limits they imposed on them by themselves and regulators. (Break-ins by government-sponsored hackers are a different kettle of fish---but even there, the giants' efforts at fending them off are probably the most competent private sector responses.))
Actually as a Google shareholder I want the Gmail team to share customer data with the YouTube team. I doubt that Google's privacy policy prevents this, and it would certainly offer better targeting of ads and therefore more revenue. Is it considered evil for one branch of a company to share customer data with another branch? Wouldn't most users expect you to do that?
And in my case they have all my search history, all my Gmail messages, all the YouTube videos I watch, all the Android apps I install, all the places I search in Google maps.
And since I leave the 'track location' setting unchanged on my phone, Google also know where I live, when I wake up and go to sleep, where I work, how long I spend at the gym, where I go shopping.
And since my friend also has an Android phone, they likely know that he's my gym buddy and how often we get together. And since my girlfriend uses Google Maps on an iPhone they can probably see that she's my girlfriend and where we like to go out together.
This is not true - Google won by being associated in people's minds with "I want more information about XYZ". Facebook won by being associated with "I want to see what my friends and family have been up to".
> And the desktop browsing experience is fading and fading.
Google has a very strong grip on mobile. They own Android, they own the most popular browser on iOS [1] and their margins are so big that they can outbid competitors to be the default search engine for the second most popular browser.
> One has to consider the question, what would the marginal cost of adding quality search to Facebook's infrastructure be? And what sort of margins would their search product need to return to support that?
It would probably cost Facebook as much as it cost Microsoft, and the return on investment would probably be similar - ie. not great.
[1] http://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/03/18/study-shows-chrome-be...
Now that we've decided Facebook is here to stay, it's soon to be overthrown.
Initially, people expected Facebook to be replaced by a better looking or more exclusive version of Facebook (the way Facebook was a better looking and more exclusive version of MySpace). That never came to pass.
The next big threat was the shift to mobile. Mobile was a huge window of opportunity for potential competitors, because Facebook's itself made a slow transition to mobile. Facebook staved this off by identifying and acquiring threats (Instagram, WhatsApp, and a bid for Snapchat).
Its biggest threat remains the emergence of a new platform. I imagine that's why Zuckerberg made such a big gamble on VR; if VR could possibly be the next platform, he felt he needed to own it. It's starting to look like consumer demand for VR was way oversold, but maybe an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Another possibility is people will simply gradually lose interest in Facebook/Instagram. I deleted FB years ago and can't imagine going back, but apparently I'm not part of a bigger trend in this regard.
Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched. Only a few people had the Internet in 1991. VR has only been in consumer hands for a few months.
Some companies and people had very unrealistic expectations about VR when they entered the space. 5-10 years seems like a realistic timeline for potential mass adoption.
> Only a few people had plasma/lcd screens when they first launched
Only a few people had 3D TVs and Segways when they first launched. Unlike the iPhone, only a few people ever had the EyePhone [1]. It remains a question whether a critical mass of people will want VR. I've witnessed many people experiencing VR where it's like "Wow, this is totally amazing" for the first five minutes, followed by complete disinterest after 15 minutes. I think that suggests that there's something there, but there are also some barriers that haven't been identified and addressed yet.
Is it the way the display cuts them off from the outside world? Some degree of immersion is desired -- people sit in dark theaters to watch movies -- but maybe VR is too much. I think it's fitting that Facebook/Zuckerberg thinks VR is the future of social networking. A "social" product that makes you feel more isolated.
[0] Though I still tend to think that even this would not be enough for most people - see 3D glasses/TVs.
VR is 50-100 years from "mass adoption" when the headsets are as light as sunglasses are today, either that, or when my kids grow in a culture of VR. A full generation at least.
I work for a Not-for-Profit in Health Care / Aged Care and we have bought Samsung VR headsets to take into the Aged Care Homes and the elderly people there have absolutely love the experiences they had.
VR headsets I put in the same category as the Microsoft Kinect or the Nintendo Wii. They are kind of fun, impressive technologies, but ultimately they are kind of a pain to use.
This. The inertia it takes to actually use it has to become as low as flipping on the TV and channel surfing. Having to locate a headset, strap it on, etc. is not what people are willing to do. Also, people don't like things on their face.
Let's put a pin in this comment and revisit it in 5-10 years. I don't have much faith in VR being a consumer favorite. They've never been found of having to put stuff on their faces.
Obvious counterexamples are eye glasses and sunglasses. There is some tradeoff between utility and discomfort where it becomes viable, but it's not clear whether the technology can get there in 5-10 years.
What did for Kinect wasn't really anything Microsoft did so much as the market deciding that they wanted the smartphone to be the centre of their universe for gaming with the TV a peripheral. That that would turn out to be the case wasn't at all obvious in 2010.
People thought something would replace Microsoft...30 years later Windows and World still more dominant than ever
For a more direct comparison Windows phone has 5% of iOS market share and 1% of Androids. Most major software news is off Windows Instagram and Pokemon Go for example really don't care about the desktop. The web got good enough that many services are native on mobile and Windoes just gets a website.
And really Facebooks main problem is they have so many users they can't really grow revenue by adding more. Which means revenue growth is generally going to drive people away.
Now it is slowly evolving into video twitter & personal news feeds. I can see it eventually adopting the rest of the functions that facebook has today. Recently they've added permanence with memories. Memories although give personal control and still prevent a bunch of problems of people seeing "the wrong facebook updates"
The load time for me on average wifi was almost unnoticeable.
[1]: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...
There're already extensions circumventing it.
Got this from this page:
https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook...
(You can't view it from desktop as they're doing browser detection and forward you to the WSJ page.)
At first, I was curious how their drive towards more video, both user- and professionally-produced, will mesh with their real name policy. But since they allow 'pages' for public figures, businesses, content creators, and other more abstract entities, they may be able to strike a happy medium where content creators can broadcast under a well-known pseudonym, while content consumers are all real people with real identities, targetable with ads. With this setup, they can mount a true challenge against established video places like Youtube and Twitch.
I have so many DR clients printing money via FB ads, CTRs are not the metric we even focus on, it is all about conversions or measurement studies to support even investing in the platform. All my clients (big and small) love the platform, ad formats and service level.
Great company, well deserved success.
If users don't even click on ads how do you measure conversions? Is it more a case of brand advertising where you're not looking for directly measurable sales?
[0] http://successwise.com/what-is-direct-response-marketing
I think you hit the nail on the head. I don't have a facebook account, so I feel like I have gotten a chance to see facebook develop in leaps and bounds (unlike their users who see it changes incrementally). The way I've experienced this is that I peruse my wife's account for family pictures once every few months. I've definitely noticed an increase in both quality and quantity of ads. Facebook ads strike me like TV ads do. While they often offer clickthroughs, I'm astonished by the number of ads that are simple positional or brand ads that don't necessarily want you to do anything, but are there to stick their brand in your mind.
It's shockingly high, especially on Facebook Audience Network (FAN), Facebook's network of 3rd party publishers.
It was so high that I initially thought I was being defrauded. But upon closer inspection, it turns out that if you specify your industry/persona well in your ads, Facebook is incredibly efficient at matching demand with supply. I've never seen such good performance on any other mobile network, Google included.
FWIW, I've only done B2B marketing in my life. I have no idea for B2C folks.
I guess they have huge PV so overall performance is high. I wonder what the actual would ROI be for other publishers on FB.
That turns out to have been false. They're getting $14.34 per year per user in the US, up ~50% over last year. There's no scenario under which they could match that with a subscription service (most people would never be willing to pay).
They're averaging $3.84 per user worldwide, up 38% over last year. You can't go around raising subscription fees by 40% or 50% per year on most of the world, but you can optimize delivering them advertising. You can boost ad rates by 50% without harming the user experience one bit.
The ad approach won again, easily.In Facebook it's going to end up producing another eventual $20+ billion annual profit money printing juggernaut ala Google. No subscription service in history has ever come close to accomplishing that sort of outcome, none ever will.
Interesting. Neither of those is "social".
So does that mean Facebook is now the largest affiliated group of human beings ever?
On an personal opt-in basis, the Catholic Church has 1.27B now, so Facebook is beating that. So yes, maybe Facebook has now become the largest single-org individual opt-in in history. Anyone know of a competitor?
Up to 3.179 billion: http://plus.miernicki.com/
Note that these are Google registrations, which include ... numerous things. I suspect most are Android activations.
The data were the basis for my own estimates of G+ user activity -- only 9% of the (then) 2.2 billion G+ profiles showed any public activity, far fewer than that if you were looking for activity in the past month.
Admittedly I cunningly lie about my age in Facebook and say I was born in 1918 (but on the correct day/month for my half-friends who don't know the actual date).
Proper Adblock on mobile devices will dilute their revenues :)
Has the believe in something Diaspora-like evaporated completely since they screwed up?
I'd expect Microsoft to buy them. It'd make more sense than LinkedIn, and cheaper, too!
Note: TWTR dropped by 15% today.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Facebook+Posts+Strong+Profit...
EDIT: and thanks for fixing it ;)
Perhaps the default link on all WSJ articles should be converted to the web link. That would solve the problem too. The volume is high enough that special treatment of these links is warranted.
HN has provided you with a workaround, WSJ has provided you with free content, and that is not enough?
How about signing up for the WSJ?
No. The volume of links to this one particular site with a very aggressive paywall has been increasing. Further, HN administrators actually change links pointing to alternative sites over to paywalled WSJ URLs when WSJ has the story (I know, because it happened with a story I submitted).
WSJ has provided you with free content
They're not ad supported?
How about signing up for the WSJ?
I might consider it, if they weren't so obnoxious with the paywall, along with inundating their pages with ads and completely blocking the loading of content when using an ad blocker. I will not reward that type of behavior, and neither should anyone else. I reported them to Google for cloaking a few weeks ago because under certain circumstances, the paywall comes up even when clicking over from Google (so, to your argument that "HN has provided [me] with a workaround" - that isn't always the case because they flagrantly violate Google's anti-cloaking policy under certain circumstances, on top of everything else).
> I will not reward that type of behavior
My mind is being blown. I'm completely feeding right now.
A few days ago I was talking to a guy in real life about pokemon go and he was both genuinely angry at the developers and also, unironically, called them entitled. I was flabbergasted. Entitled for making something and allowing this guy to use it, but him being genuinely angry at people he'd never met, nor had any dealings with, for not providing enough value was completely reasonable to him.
All I know is that if I ever run a business or accidentally become a celebrity, I'm keeping an army of PR suits between me and the general public. Too many people indignant about too many things to attempt honest public discourse with my real name attached.
I made a statement that it might be nice if WSJ gave HN users the same treatment they give to Google users. You've made a radical generalization about someone based upon a single statement on a comment thread.
People that make radical generalizations about others based upon one data point are among the most dangerous in our society. Hitler did this, as do religiously motivated terrorists, racists, etc. Upon what other data points do you make such generalizations? Race? Religion? Sex?
People that make radical generalizations about others based upon one data point are among the most dangerous in our society.
People that get indignant and demanding about things are some of the most dangerous in society. Dispassionate egoists don't blow themselves up.
Given the sheer volume of WSJ paywall links posted here, combined with the significance of YC, surely someone at YC could call someone at WSJ and get them to bypass the paywall when the referrer is HN.
It was an explanation of a problem and a suggested solution. Nothing more, nothing less.
>Dispassionate egoists don't blow themselves up.
Given your comments above, it's pretty clear that you are far from dispassionate in your hatred of those with whom you disagree.
"Explanation of a problem" even here you're showing of what I've accused you of. You have a problem. HN doesn't seem to have a problem. WSJ doesn't seem to have a problem. But you're phrasing it like it's something objectively wrong. It's not a problem it's your problem.
You don't like something and you want it a different way. That's fine. But adding all of this shit about them being abusive, obnoxious, calling them ridiculous; shows that no, you don't just want something to be a certain way you think that there's a failure on someones part if it isn't.
Now you appear to be trying to what, back peddle in to the part of disinterested bystander? At least own up to your sense of entitlement. It's as defensible of a position as any other.
EDIT:
dispassionate in your hatred of those with whom you disagree.
Hatred is what you're getting from this? Yeah this isn't going anywhere.
> this isn't going anywhere.
You're correct, this isn't going anywhere.
"If they gave me all the content upfront for free without ads, I would then choose pay for it".
You expect us to believe this?