Not all that surprising if you think about it, a lot of people assume eyeballs = money, but the quality of the eyeballs is more important than the quantity. What are you going to sell to a bunch of kids watching videos of backyard wrestling? Hulu has quality TV shows, which attract a better audience. Considering some of the biggest show on Hulu are SNL, the Daily Show, Colbert, etc the audience has a pretty well educated lean.
This is Facebook's underlying problem. All the network effects in the world just aren't as valuable as Facebook would like you to believe when the site is nearly all broke college students wasting time.
That last sentence is so true it hurts, and that's a point I've been trying to preach for a very long time (only to get downvotes). There is nothing of worth on Facebook. Nothing.
Was it Mashable.com that did the study and found that almost every Facebook app was developed and marketed as a "just for fun" app?
I find more utility out of Twitter than I do Facebook; over the last year I've made four new friends on Twitter who live near me one of whom is about to let me rent a house from him. That's utility, and it's organic; I don't need some marketplace to look for someone to rent from. When you're capable of making connections just on location alone and let people do the work of becoming friends you've got something. And on that, Twitter beats out Facebook everytime.
I could not disagree more. Facebook is rapidly replacing email, phone, and other channels as the method that many people use to keep up with friends and family. My parents and literally hundreds of their friends have started using it over the last six months and now use it aggressively. These people are definitely not early adopters or anything...most of them are conservative midwesterners in their 40s and 50s, and most of them are very active on a daily basis, using everything from status updates to photo uploads.
Facebook hasn't figured out how to monetize their userbase yet, but the social utility value is enormous.
The other side of the coin I've been trying to preach. Left and right you see Facebook making some kind of big marketing maneuver, some new ad partner.
Maybe I'm naive to this new wave of web based business, but how has Facebook managed to partner up with Microsoft, and all of these other ad providers and not raise a single dime?
I understand what you're saying, but anytime you have hundreds of millions of people using a service, there are lots of ways that you can add value without undermining the primary utility; in many cases you can actually enhance it.
Facebook DOES have utility and value, it just is for the users and not the advertisers.
It is a self-updating white pages, and college organizations use groups in place of their own websites and mailing lists to great effect. When I want to invite 20 people to a poker tournament, text messages or facebook are the way. These things are all valuable to me.
But that doesn't mean that advertising is the right revenue model. Getting those guys to come over and pay $10 to play poker is about all the money you will get out of my group of friends on any given friday night. $5 is often the buy in as we get deeper into the semester.
I really think start ups need to stop being so adverse to charging money. The freemium model works. I don't buy a damn thing from the advertisers on facebook, but I paid $25 for the Remember the Milk app for my iPod because it is so valuable to me.
The question is: what does Facebook have to offer that they could monetize? They've offered their core services for free for so long, they'd get hurt if they started charging for any of it. And they could try to rip off the App Store, but not many Facebook apps are very good.
I observe the same thing with Facebook's local analog in my country. People who doesn't know what the Google is (it is hard to imagine but there are such people) are actively using the online social network (status updates, photo uploads).
Exactly. Facebook is very close to becoming a communications company. In fact they're not even that different than a walled-garden carrier. Both companies are aiming for the same target, they just have different starting assets...
You'd be surprised how many people you know after 50 years of life...you'd also be surprised how many of them are on Facebook.
Granted, a lot of those people aren't close friends or family members. Many of them are people that my parents knew decades ago and have lost touch with. I actually think that one of the most valuable things about Facebook (and twitter) is that it allows you to more effortlessly keep in touch with more people than 1-to-1 communication methods like email, phone, IM, etc.
Facebook has the eyes of nearly every kid from the age of 14-22 at this point, and it's still growing rapidly. That's something of worth. Perhaps it isn't something that lends to advertising easily (though Facebook is adapting a new ad scheme that I like a lot), but don't dismiss that as being nothing of worth.
You're in the vast minority there. Facebook has more active users than Twitter is likely to have a year or two from now.
Hackers have a distorted view of things, because almost all of us are used to seeing the "big picture" of the Internet. We don't realize that most people use one or two web sites at most, and that for some people, Facebook IS the Internet.
I'm in the vast minority on HN anyway, given that I'm in Marketing and work for a company employing over 2,000 people with no sanctioned use of Lisp :-P
But, yeah, I wasn't trying to downplay Facebook, but only agreeing that I'm one of those people who would be a Facebooker in name only if it weren't for Twitter, from which I get much greater utility.
And college students are a great demo to market to (they buy all sorts of things).
This is about Hulu coming out of the gates with ads, and having a big pile of salespeople who know how to sell ads for TV shows. The players involved all have existing relationships with entities who BUY video advertising... They have a fully-baked business model from stage 1.
Youtube is JUST starting to experiment with it (and trying to build a more innovative model than the existing "just toss in commercials" option.
I agree that citing 'quality of eyeballs' is silly. Actually just as silly as assuming eyeballs=money.
In fact, eyeballs have never really equalled money. The ability to affect the things behind those eyeballs = money. Actually, the perception of businesses of the potential to affect the things behind those eyeballs = money.
Your right. Hulu hasn't really proven anything yet. They've proven that they can get ad buyers to buy online if presented with something similar enough to offline TV. You can build a reasonable business based on this model, apparently.
But it's true that Youtube hasn't proved anything yet business-wise.
Even worse for Facebook, it's nearly all foreign people. There's just very little money to be made on the web outside of the U.S. Most other countries are either too poor or too small.
The standard of living in much of the EU is pretty bad, and in the rest there generally aren't many people. There may be 800 million total, but only a small subset of them are marketable.
The U.S. has almost as much GDP as the entire EU, while having <40% of the population which, most importantly, means a lot more discretionary income.
I hope you didn't take my statements as jingoistic, it's just a well-known fact that U.S. users monetize much better than the rest of the world in general.
This is Facebook's underlying problem. All the network effects in the world just aren't as valuable as Facebook would like you to believe when the site is nearly all broke college students wasting time.