

Will Facebook be the Next Yahoo? - feydr
http://robgo.org/2012/01/29/will-facebook-be-the-next-yahoo/

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jonnathanson
No matter the challenges, Facebook still has one thing going for it that will
keep it solid for years to come: switching costs. Rebuilding a social network,
from the ground up, is hard and annoying work (sorry, G+, but it's true).

Back in the day, switching from Yahoo to Google was as simple as entering a
new URL into one's browser. Switching from AOL to a different ISP was slightly
more difficult, but not much more difficult than cancelling one subscription
and signing up for another.

But if you look at the landscape of interest-based or activity-based social
networking utilities today -- Pinterest, Tumblr, and so forth -- they really
don't look like Facebook killers. In fact, many of them have integrated
Facebook credentialing. In aggregate, they may take user eyeballs off of the
Facebook homepage -- but they aren't taking user accounts away from Facebook.

Facebook seems to realize that the key to its longevity will be as a de facto
social and identity credential, and not necessarily as a destination website
(although that's nice, too). People may not want to spend as much time on
Facebook.com as they once did, but it will take a _lot_ to get them to abandon
the Facebook ecosystem altogether.

Accordingly, I submit that the real challenge Facebook faces isn't monetizing
display ad space on Facebook.com; it's monetizing the rest of the internet as
credentialed by Facebook. (To your point, the "off-Facebook" ad platform).
This challenge isn't insurmountable, either. In fact, it doesn't strain the
imagination to think of an AdSense-competitor product that could serve up
contextually relevant advertising to FB-credentialed users as they surfed the
rest of the web.

