20 Ways Facebook Can Make Billions | Hacker News Reader

20 Ways Facebook Can Make Billions

allfacebook.com

16 pointskwamenum866 comments

In summary:

- Become better at advertising

- Sell completely unrelated crap (water, gear, hardware, phone), because they've got a good brand and advertising platform

- Charge users and developers, "somehow" (great advise, thank you!)

- Sell their data (anonymously, though)

- Advertise more (pretty contrary to the claim that they have a brilliant, under-utilized advertising platform)

- Be something else (corporate intranet, dev. payment platform, eBay, Skype, Second Life (WTF?!), Online bank, cloud storage, Tor network, physical loyalty card)

Basically: There is no Facebook business model, besides the one they already figured out (advertising) and can't make work, and the one about selling their data, that users had a strong antipathy of (beacon).

Becoming a corporate intranet is a little viable, but it doesn't really leverage the Facebook network. A corporate intranet doesn't need the network effect that is really the cores of Facebook. They have Active Directory.

Agreed that charging developers is truly stupid and charging your basic user is close, but developing a subscription model for advanced services makes sense. For example, an all you can eat music service. If you view "be something else" as brand extension or premium services, then it makes sense. Not all of the suggestions are worthwhile, agreed. Online bank, no, but applications that directly leverage facebook itself, yes.

The most obvious way to monetise facebook is to me some kind of job advertising platform. They have all this data on people, like whether they're students, where and studying what, etc. Companies looking to recruit could buy job ad placements based on those criteria. (e.g. show this job to final-year CompSci BSc students at Cambridge and Oxford) The more specific and popular, the more expensive.

I suppose it's possible that they've explored it but there isn't a market for this. I guess with the job market right now might not be the best time for that kind of feature - on the other hand there are probably lots of users who would use it.

See something like this makes sense for LinkedIn, who unless I am mistaken is already doing it well and making money off it. If you take a look at the Facebook Marketplace, you will find it is pretty diluted with spam and other junk listings (Last time I checked this was 6 months ago so I may be wrong now.)

If you look at who's using Facebook, most of them are using it to play games and spread PIRATE BOOTY not search for jobs. Although there is a small subset of users who would use it, I don't think it would be enough to monetize.

Depends how small the subset is. They have ~150 million users and should break 200 million this year. Several services serving small subsets could be enough to make a profit.

Several of the suggestions are very low-margin activities; Facebook might not be able to earn serious money from those even with improbably huge revenues. But Facebook does have a capacity to gather an astounding amount of data about each user, and it would be missing an opportunity not to find some way to monetize that. The downside risk, of course, is that if Facebook finds a way to get money from users' willingness to share personal information that they may become less willing. Online social networks appear to have huge elasticity of participation depending on how the business model and thus culture of the nework changes.

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