This Gawker articlemakes the argument that Facebook is a wildly over valued stock that (so far) doesn’t present any compelling way to generate cash for investors.
The notion of selling ads is apparently derailed by the fact that no one really pays attention to the awful Facebook ads ( I sure don’t), and they are becoming regarded as largely a waste of time and money by advertisers.
If this is the case why is the promise of Facebook going public so eagerly anticipated?
I think it’s way too early to count Facebook ads out, yet.
They have the potential to deliver incredibly specifically targeted ads. They have astonishing amounts of personal information. It’s a demographer’s wet dream. Now, it’s possible that people who use Facebook aren’t in a purchasing mood, or that advertisers don’t ever learn how to use it successfully, or that Facebook doesn’t keep happy and engaged users around long enough to profit off them.
Obviously, Facebook is priced based on what people think it might do. If it stays the dominant social network and thus becomes the dominant advertising platform, it’ll pay off. Clearly if they can’t figure out how to do that, it won’t.
Eventually, advertisers will come to their senses and realize that web ads are more akin to magazine ads (if you see it, it was successful) that they like to think now.
Volume.
Charging folks money to get ahead playing their damn games.
I don’t know if you’re joking or not, but they already do this,
Even if 99.9% of their users think the ads are useless trash, that still leaves plenty of people who will click on them.
I’ve read that Facebook takes 30% of the cut from game sales (as in, sales related to games - not the selling of the ability to play the games). A cut that huge is unheard of.
I’ve also read that Google’s going to start having games (if they don’t already) and take a vastly lower cut (9%?)
So while a good bit of their money can and does come from games, it’s not a sustainable model since the easy reply to that is “I will take my game somewhere else that charges me less of a fee.”
99.9% useless trash rate (UTR) would put them at about industry average.
Currently they are at 99.95% useless trash rate which is resulting in about 1b profit. Rate would have to increase quite a bit to justify market cap of company.
The problem with the social games is that (it appears) they want their users to push the game to friended people, and this often causes the game users to be eventually blocked or dropped as friends by people like me and a lot of other facebook users to get out from under the fire hose of game invite spam these people generate. .
There are so few Flash game platforms that allow this kind of in-game purchasing that saying “a cut that huge is unheard of” is kind of a meaningless statement. Most game sites are owned-and-operated by the gamemakers themselves. Facebook is rather unique in that regard.
Google added games to Google Plus within a few weeks of the launch. Here we are almost a year later and Google Plus is as good as dead.
Zynga is in the process of launching their own Zynga Network, but it’ll be a long time before they can pull away from Facebook’s billion users. The problem with this theory is that (as Google Plus showed) there is no where else to go.
My theory: Facebook is sitting on a hugely valuable asset. They’ll find a way to monetize it eventually. If I knew exactly how they would do that, then (i) I’d be a lot richer than I am now and (ii) I wouldn’t tell the likes of you guys about it. 
Sorry, I meant in a general sense with any sort of agreement like that. From a salon renting chairs to beauticians to the Apple App Store.
You are indeed correct that there is nothing quite like it out there.
As for Google Plus being dead, I agree. But if the game companies want to leave Facebook for a cheaper venue, might not they take some users with them?
I don’t think games ruin as many Facebook relationships as you think, astro. I know that my friends play them - some of them play like a dozen games each - but it’s easy enough to hide game data from within Facebook now that I rarely notice anyone’s game activity. You used to have to get a browser plugin to hide them but I’m guessing enough people bitched that Facebook made it easier to hide the game shit but didn’t get rid of the games themselves.
In fact, I saw the other day that I now have a “Games Feed” where I suspect all of the game-related posts go. And it’s already so ignored that I had to go look for it just to write this paragraph. Apps - > More -> Games Feed.
Apple store takes 30% cut on the sale price of any app in it.
That always seems to come up when comparing the Apple App Store and the Google/Android store, too. Like “The App Store is awesome but…” heh
To be fair, Apple maintains its App Store as a monopoly. Goog’s app store is one of dozens, and the fracturing is very damaging to the marketing of apps.
From what I have seen from app developers, even with the insane 30% cut that Apple takes, a LOT more money flows from iPhone/iPad apps than from equivalent Android apps. And by a lot I mean 5-10 times more.
I pay attention to the ads sometimes because they are often so weird. Here’s some examples. I never saw any of those ads on Facebook, but I’ve seen others that were equally strange.
I agree that Facebook is sitting on a lot of potential but it is yet to be seen if, how and when they can convert that potential into enough income to justify the share price. Facebook is currently being valued at something like $100 per account, some people have multiple accounts and a lot fo those accounts are for people with very little disposable income.
It has almost become an article of faith among Facebook devotees that they will somehow figure out how to increase Facebook’s income tenfold in a reasonably short period of time. That the geniuses over there will figure it out somehow but noone seems to have the first idea how but almost everyone agrees that ad revenue won’t be enough to justify the price unless there is some sort of paradigm shift in how people use facebook in their lives.
This seems to be lost today. Advertisement is not just to get people to immediately drop what they are doing and run out and purchase the product. It is also about building the brand. Imagine if TV ads could be measured to see who watched the ad and IMMEDIATELY ran out of the house to the store to buy the product. If they didn’t do exactly that, then the Ad failed for that person.
However, for Internet Ads, this seems to be the only metric advertisers look at probably because, unlike TV, they can. It is a very one-dimensional view of marketing.
Facebook was launched in February 2004. I hadn’t even heard of the website until at least a year after it was launched, and I was a college student at the time. I think it’s too early to declare that Google Plus is dead.