

20 Ways Facebook Can Make Billions - kwamenum86
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/01/facebook-billion-dollars/

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mseebach
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.

~~~
russell
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.

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pmjordan
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.

~~~
truebosko
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.

~~~
kwamenum86
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.

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tokenadult
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.

