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The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

economist.com

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Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#131

Post by MarkMc »

ankit219 wrote: post #83
puranjay wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who should on Facebook aren't there any more - the young and the influential You can't grow with an audience base filled with 50 year olds.

You can't grow when you have onboarded most of the world with access to internet. (total users is 2B. When they are not even in China)

Facebook can still grow its revenue even if the number of users is constant if: (a) Users become richer over time; (b) Users spend more time online; (c) Facebook can improve the algorithm that matches ads to users

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#132

Post by MarkMc »

MagnaEterna wrote: post #18
King-Aaron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's around 2.23 billion active users you might want to pass that message on to.

They are all old. Facebook will probably still be functioning for the next 40 years until it's users finally die and then it's over.

They might be all old in US and Europe. But in India and other third world countries Facebook seems to be doing OK with young people.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#133

Post by wild_preference »

pavlov wrote: post #112
nothis wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows doesn’t have true competition. Facebook has. Even if they’re clever and buying lots of it. Still, Instagram has nowhere near the amount of neatly categorized personal data as Facebook which is interesting.

> Windows doesn’t have true competition. Facebook has. Care to elaborate? I can't think of anyone.

This is usually where someone confirms your original point by saying Mastodon.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#134

Post by wild_preference »

pier25 wrote: post #118
King-Aaron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's around 2.23 billion active users you might want to pass that message on to.

Yeah, but it's really a matter of time. Facebook has become the social network for grandmas and aunties. Facebook has expanded to new countries in the last decade which has brought these millions of users, but younger generations in countries that have had Facebook for a long time are not using it anymore. In the US most Facebook users are between 25-34. There are barely any teenagers. https://www.statista.com/statis…

Staking your claim on what teenagers today do today doesn't make much sense to me because teenagers get older.

Facebook just has to be the social network people end up on.

I'd at least look at college-aged people, not the weird, limited social life of high schoolers.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#135

Post by ksec »

wybiral wrote: post #108
nolok wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ... In incubators, side projects, etc ... But they failed to bring their innovations to their main products, or to turn their side things into full blown products. They had no plan, neither overall or per product. Take emails for exemple, for the longest time (and still now, although not as dominating) THE key to user identity…

> The best non-yahoo similarity I can find is what Google is doing with Blogger. That's a good point. But to be fair everything "social" that Google has touched has died with the exception of YouTube. In fact Google really hasn't done a great job holding onto many other arenas than their main ones. Blogger has been blasted by Medium. Knol was outlasted by Quora. Google Code was beat by Github. Their "shopping" attemp…

The problem with Google is exactly the same as Microsoft in the 90s.

They just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. What that means is, I don't mean it in a small way but in a big way.

- Steve Jobs.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#136

Post by nindalf »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #92

It's easy to predict that companies will fail, because most do in the end. It's very rare for companies to survive for long periods of time. Just look at the fortune 500 over time. It changes, massively, from decade to decade. If anything that trend is accelerating: companies grow faster and disappear faster as well. So, predicting that neither e.g. Google nor Facebook will be around a decade or two from now is not t…

> It changes, massively, from decade to decade. If anything that trend is accelerating: companies grow faster and disappear faster as well

This is not true.

Across the West powerful firms are becoming even more powerful - Report published last week by the Economist

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/11/15/across-t...

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#137

Post by sys_64738 »

FB is failing because it’s old now and no hip millennial wants to be seen using the same social media web page as their mom. That’s why FB is falling as he core demographic for nativity that advertisers need to manipulate it has left. All FB needs to do is follow the millennials and buy up the services they decant to.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#138

Post by malvosenior »

sys_64738 wrote: post #137

FB is failing because it’s old now and no hip millennial wants to be seen using the same social media web page as their mom. That’s why FB is falling as he core demographic for nativity that advertisers need to manipulate it has left. All FB needs to do is follow the millennials and buy up the services they decant to.

Millennials are 30-40 years old. If FB wants to be hip they need to go after gen z and beyond.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#139

Post by sys_64738 »

nolok wrote: post #81
dkrich wrote: post #75

This seems implausible precisely because it’s the crowded view. But can anyone recall a time that the crowd correctly predicted the ascent of an unpopular product or the descent of a popular one? I’m old enough to remember Yahoo’s rise and fall. There was a time people thought Zuckerberg was a greedy fool for turning down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo. Oh yeah did we forget about that? Yahoo failed because they were ou…

> Yahoo failed because they were out-innovated The worst part is that Yahoo innovated a lot ... In incubators, side projects, etc ... But they failed to bring their innovations to their main products, or to turn their side things into full blown products. They had no plan, neither overall or per product. Take emails for exemple, for the longest time (and still now, although not as dominating) THE key to user identity…

Yahoo failed because they were a directory service that saw the search box as less relevant. Google recognized that searching is the human approach, not ordering stuff into folders, which is an obsessive compulsive trait.

Re: The new Yahoo? Facebook should heed the lessons of internet history

#140

Post by richardknop »

tokai wrote: post #14
kilroy123 wrote: post #8

From reading some of the stuff Yahoo put out back in their prime. I always got the sense that they thought they would never fall and were maybe a bit invincible. I think Zuckerberg and Facebook in general, are very aware that Facebook is on the decline, they need to diversify. That's why they bought Instagram and used it to flight Snap. That's why they spent such an insane amount on WhatsApp. Zuckerberg knows they ne…

>Zuckerberg knows they need to create or acquire the next big thing to make it in the long Isn't that exactly what yahoo did?

But Yahoo pretty much ruined companies they bought like Tumblr for example. I’m not saying Facebook won’t make the same mistake but so far they have done a relatively good job with Instagram and WhatsApp. Both of them are very popular and growing. Much different story than Yahoo, at least so far.
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