At some point in the near future, hopefully, I'll be gearing up my own little e-business on the side, since it appears to be the only way to do more than eke one's way through life in our postmodern paradise. And with such a venture will come the requisite social marketing presence, of which Facebook is still currently the primary mode of disseminating marketing piffle.
So it's not that I necessarily wanted the vaunted Facebook IPO to fail so epically, it's just that none of the numbers made any sense. No one seemed able to explain where the $100bn market cap came from (after being estimated at $45bn a little over a year ago), for a company with almost no discernible revenue model.
Someone should put Jamie Dimon on the case; he seems pretty adept at falling into buckets of shit and not splashing a drop.
I imagine you must have seen this already:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.technologyreview.com/web/40437/?p1=A1
I hadn't seen that, thanks for the link. It basically confirms my suspicions about what passes for Facebook's revenue model, and how ad-based revenue is sinking like a stone.
ReplyDeleteActually, I was under the impression that a significant chunk of their revenue was data mining and bundling, but that didn't really come up int he article. Either way, there's no way it could be enough to merit that bullshit market cap.
Actually, you make a really interesting point there -- the people at Fbook may discover it's more profitable to write some software that slices and dices the huge pile of data they're sitting on, and then sell various slices to marketers and sellers of various shit. It'll be like selling Rove's direct-mailing list and Bank of America's list of customer emails, but a lot more fine-textured: why bother to pay for a coarse-grained list of various people who have ever bought electronics from Amazon, when you can sell a list of people (and their info) who have expressed a wish to try the new Canon EOS Whatever the fuck.
ReplyDeleteTaking the dark arts of marketing to the next level. Glad I ain't on that Face thing, myself. I think I'm gonna stay put.