

Investors finally realizing Facebook has no clothes - tech77
http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/287629/investors-finally-realizing-facebook-has-no-clothes

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tptacek
'tech77 is an ITworld bot account.

The way you know that is, this is a post from ITworld. Overwhelmingly, posts
from ITworld only land on HN when they're posted by bot accounts. There's a
long history of them.

I was under the impression that this was OK, but 'pg pointed out last week
that he just hasn't gotten around to detecting and booting these accounts.

In the meantime, I'll help do it manually by flagging the story.

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mtjl79
The problem I see is, Facebook ad's are never really going to be extremely
lucrative. People don't search on Facebook. They want to play games and post
stuff on their walls, looks at other peoples photos, etc. etc.

I think Facebook needs to seriously think how they can monetize aside from
ads. Obviously with all those users and data, the possibilities are endless.

• Job boards and paid job postings • Get people to shop for stuff. •
Subscriptions services: Dropbox style storage, who knows what else, etc. etc.
• Get more local and offers deals. You know where a billion people live. •
Offer business services for businesses pages. Upgrades, focus on ecommerce on
business pages and charge for it. • + Who knows what else? They can be a
million other things.

I just thought about this for 5 minutes, and I am sure people that actually
work at Facebook have weeks, months and years to think about this. I have no
idea why they aren't moving faster with this.

From what I see, they are all in on FB Ads, but that wasn't the way to go.
Maybe it was the surest thing in the beginning, but now - they really need to
step it up.

My 2 cents.

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jsmcallister
Getting into the online dating scene would be a great money move for FaceBook.
It's such a simple and obvious move that there must be something/someone
internal that is preventing it. FaceBook has access to millions of people
listed as "single", a large % of which are already using a pay-service like
Match or eHarmony (which collectively boast around 35 million members).

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jsmcallister
"Advertising effectively in the mobile experience" is basically Taps on a
trumpet for the FaceBook app. I don't know anyone who actually _enjoys_ using
the existing app. It's clunky, poorly sorted, and extremely hard to navigate.
Why does FaceBook want to make the experience even less enjoyable?

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AznHisoka
they should charge a monthly subscription for the mobile experience. like
$2.99 a month or even $1.99 a month. If nobody pays it means Facebook provides
thin, trivial value, and shouldn't deserve to be valued so high. It's the
truth. Hey, can't have your cake and eat it too.

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nicholassmith
I think it's fairly safe to say most people paying attention would have
predicted this (obviously financial analysts aren't as cynically-savvy as us
HN lurkers).

Is this bad news for Facebook? Sure, the company is getting a hammering in the
press. Have they made out like filthy bandits from the IPO? Of course. They've
sold enough shares to keep going for a long while, but unless they can find a
truly innovate mobile strategy they'll burn cash like no ones business.

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emmett
You know Facebook is profitable right? Maybe not VERY profitable compared to
other internet giants, but they made $1 billion in 2011.

<http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/facebook-1-billion-profit/>

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nicholassmith
Yeah, I wasn't too much concerned about current profit, but more future
profit. Mobile is sticky and increasing, if they can't get a profit stream off
it they'll start burning cash on users they're not making much money on.

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dfriedmn
how about a non-ads business? they add a ton of value by serving as the
identity provider for the web, but all they're monetizing is pageviews... you
would think they could/should capture some of the value they create at some
point.

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talmand
Are you saying they should charge websites to use their login with Facebook
feature? Is that even worth paying for? I'm curious what the value in that is
but I don't think I would pay Facebook for their branding on my pages.

