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Comment by wen3 | Hacker News Reader

So Facebook is basically killing it in mobile without building phones and phone operating systems. Google whats up with that?

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It's the stream; Facebook has a stream and Google does not.

After various experiments, I think people have figured out that the #1 way to make money on mobile is to have a stream of information that people willingly spend lots of time in. You just inject ads into that stream and bingo: profit. It's much harder for Google to win big here because while they have a very useful tool, people don't linger in it. They usually use it to get in, get what they need, and get out.

>I think people have figured out that the #1 way to make money on mobile is to have a stream of information that people willingly spend lots of time in

Twitter says hi

Twitter has generally done decently well on revenue per user (although that has performed worse recently as they've reduced their sales force). Twitter's problem, more than anything else, has always been increasing active users.

That's just the plan; you still have to execute capably on that plan, which is where Twitter falls down. Honestly Twitter could be healthy company- not as profitable as Facebook, but healthy- if they didn't have such incompetent management

If this was so simple then the owners of reddit would be sitting on a gold mine.

Reddit is a pot if fights slowly being boiled by the new leadership. Just look at all the recent changes.

They now run Moat tags on the site and just added new targeting options based on interests.

The feed frequency has also increased.

The only reason they aren't doing it faster because the frogs are getting frisky.

Doh--missed my edit window.

*"Reddit is a pot of frogs slowly being boiled"

Reddit only started putting ads /in the stream/ of comments and posts pretty recently.

Do those even show up in the API?

I think you also need to close your API if you want to fully milk your streams.

Key distinction: that feed must have an algorithm controlling it's order so as to maximize the profit.

Android makes a ton of money for Google because for every Android phone, that's one more user they don't have to pay to have their default search engine be google.

Take a look at the Oracle case - Google pays billions of dollars a year to Apple to have their search on iPhones. And it's not a flat fee, it's a percentage of revenue.

Facebook doesn't have this problem because there is no other social network. Search engines don't really have network effects, facebook does.

It's fun being a free rider!

Google should start show ads on top of Facebook. If you are not paying, you are the product ;)

Plenty of companies made money on Windows without directly paying Microsoft. Google gets some revenue from Android OEMs licensing the rights to distribute Gapps. If Facebook moves Android phone sales, Google makes money. Not nearly as much as MS did per unit, but Android is also installed on way more devices today than Windows ever could have hoped to be.

Google does advertise on Facebook. There's no way for them to put AdWords or AdSense ads on Facebook without their cooperation, and if you're suggesting they do it through Android, they can have a blast trying to sell Android phones when Facebook pulls themselves from them.

And just what will those users buy? The Samsung-S7 (and equivalents) will buy a similarly priced iPhone. The rest have no alternative. BlackBerry is down and out. Windows Phone essentially is too. The only remaining players are iOS (at 10% of the market and 90% of the profit) and Android (with the rest).

That's my point. Google would never use their control of Android to serve their own AdWords or AdSense ads on Facebook on mobile, because the loss of Facebook would push the Android segment that makes them money (the higher end segment) towards iOS

Why won't you Google it.

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