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Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#151

Post by skybrian »

losteric wrote: post #52
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

But we could have an open social network that operates outside a single company... building on the foundational principles of the internet. These "social networks" exist because it's still too hard to setup and manage a personal website, and those sites lack the interactiveness of FB. Imagine if everyone had their own 1-click website with glorified RSS feeds, webrtc-based chat, access control, media sharing, and stan…

The biggest issue is what the rules are and how that affects the user interface.

Using email, the rule is that if someone sends you something, you own it; they could ask you to do delete it, but you can refuse. Facebook and other social networks let you edit and delete posts. Snapchat became big because you can send pictures that are automatically deleted after you view them.

Sure, you can reimplement basic message exchange in a decentralized way, but figuring out how to enforce the same rules in a decentralized system is nontrivial.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#152

Post by rconti »

inetknght wrote: post #121
grandalf wrote: post #88

Interestingly, I'm someone who does not click on ads, but the last 3 ads I've clicked on were on Facebook, and two resulted in purchases. I can't help it when the ads are for cool things like a $20 USB endoscope.

> I'm someone who does not click on ads, but the last 3 ads I've clicked on I'm not sure what you mean when you say you don't click on ads. I don't click on ads. None of the ads I've clicked on have resulted in purchases. Instead, they've resulted in me swearing at the website showing a popup or otherwise being deceptive about user interactions.

I've actually bought a few cool products based on FB ads where I never clicked on ads in my previous couple of decades online. Unfortunately I can't remember what I bought or explain what was different about the product or FB ad experience that caused me to click.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#153

Post by Retra »

nl wrote: post #101
danmaz74 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consensus I remember was that Facebook posed a real threat to a free and open internet, because it's a kind of walled garden. That consensus, alas, is as current as ever.

You aren't looking back far enough. There was a very strong feeling that FB could never make money. Then suddenly people started complaining about the walled garden effect...

The market can be unpredictable, but people's fickle opinions cannot, apparently. If only those things were related in any way...

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#154

Post by vadym909 »

Hopefully their newly unionized cafeteria workers can extract a bit more from them, then Google would have to do the same to Google Express drivers, then Apple to its coach drivers, and this trickle down effect to non-tech jobs may actually work. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/24/hundreds-of-facebook-c...

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#155

Post by adventured »

jumpkickhit wrote: post #115

I'll give them credit, Facebook figured out how to monetize themselves. Versus say, Twitter, which i don't use and still don't understand how it even exists.

Interestingly, Twitter's problem is not monetization, it's cost vs scale.

They managed to do $2.5 billion in sales with about 300 million monthly actives for 2016 (the 300m is wonky, I don't know what the avg was for the year etc, but they were near that anyway).

If you scaled them to Facebook's size, they'd be at an equivalent $16.5 billion annually. Account for the benefits of scale that Facebook derives, and it's reasonable to say they're monetizing OK given their 300x million users.

The problem? Their costs are well out of line. When Facebook had $2 billion in sales (2010), they generated $600 million in net income. Instead, at that scale, Twitter is bleeding half a billion dollars on the net income line; they've basically got a billion dollar profit imbalance vs what Facebook was doing at the same scale.

Also worth noting, Facebook hit around 500 million users in July 2010 (the year they did $2b in sales). Twitter is monetizing better than Facebook was at the same user scale. The negative comparison of course, is that Facebook had far more users, and still generated $600m in net income (radically better cost management).

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#156

Post by ams6110 »

wcummings wrote: post #145
teirce wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just a crazy millennial, but I absolutely loathe the idea of FB / Insta stories. Snapchat going under wouldn't convince me to move over -- I'd just stop using the service and move on to communicating some other way. And Stories aren't the only appeal of SNAP, though I suppose they are a large producer of revenue. HN just loves to hate SNAP, and I can't really fathom why. I can get being skeptical but every…

Same, SnapChat is the only "social" app I use. I don't even use stories. Very few of my friends publish stories. I think mostly marketers use them.

Everyone in my teen sons social circles use snap. Nobody is on Facebook.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#157

Post by taneq »

austenallred wrote: post #96
adventured wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring debt: Microsoft ($126b), Apple ($256b), Facebook ($35b), Berkshire Hathaway (near $100b), Cisco ($68b), Google ($92b), Oracle ($66b), Softbank (a lot), Amgen ($38b), Ford ($40b), Samsung ($73b), Johnson & Johnson ($39b), GE ($82b) There are a lot of financial entities and the like that have more cash than that of course. It's held under a different financial context than the cash that eg Apple is sitting on.…

And to be fair, "ignoring debt" is kind of an odd way to measure something like "who is sitting on cash"

Think of it not as "what's their net worth" and more as "what's the biggest cheque they could write today that wouldn't bounce."

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#158

Post by eganist »

jdhn wrote: post #149
teirce wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just a crazy millennial, but I absolutely loathe the idea of FB / Insta stories. Snapchat going under wouldn't convince me to move over -- I'd just stop using the service and move on to communicating some other way. And Stories aren't the only appeal of SNAP, though I suppose they are a large producer of revenue. HN just loves to hate SNAP, and I can't really fathom why. I can get being skeptical but every…

Another crazy millennial here. I don't have an Instagram either, and frankly I don't want one. As for why HN hates Snap, I'm not exactly sure. Is it because the average user on HN is older and isn't targeted by Snap? Maybe it's seen as a frivolous plaything? No matter what the reason, there's definitely a lot of hate for Snap on this site.

My reasoning for loathing snap was their refusal to even allow a snap client for windows phone to exist.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#159

Post by jdavis703 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #37
taurath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the growth!! Thoughts on anti-trust? If you're capturing every single part of the growth of a huge previously diversified market, whats the arguments against?

It seems like it would be a disaster to break up Facebook. You can't really have more than one social network that everybody uses. Forcing everyone to split off into groups wouldn't work, to put it mildly.

Sure you can break Facebook up without destroying the Facebook.com social network. Facebook's dev tools and infrastructure (including Oculus) is spun off into a developer tools focused company. Facebook advertising is spun off into a separate "ad agency." Facebook.com can be this new ad agency's launch customer, but they're free to add their ads to other sites such as Twitter. Instagram and Whatsapp are spun off into separate entities.

Re: Facebook Profit Jumps 71% Year-over-Year

#160

Post by ams6110 »

StevePerkins wrote: post #77

Maybe I live in a bubble, but I just assumed that Facebook would be on a decline trajectory by now. Their website is almost meaningless to my day-to-day life at this point. I login once every couple of weeks, upload some pics of my kids for Grandma to look at, and then log off. I don't personally know anyone who still uses it regularly as we did back in 2007. I don't know a tactful way to put this... but it seems lik…

I'm 50 and have never used Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Google+, Myspace, or any of it.
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