What do you do after your site grows to 800 million users and expands to 1 trillion pageviews per month? Why, plan a $100 billion IPO, of course!
Going public is clearly the biggest thing on tap for Facebook
in 2012, but the world’s most populated social network and its users
have a lot to look forward to over the coming year. From the maturation
of Mark Zuckerberg as a leader to Facebook’s growth as a media platform
to a looming collision with the world’s biggest tech companies, 2012 is
poised to be one of the most important years in the company’s short
history.
Read on for our predictions for Facebook’s upcoming year, and be sure to add your ideas in the comments.
The IPO
It’s safe to say that Facebook’s long-rumored IPO will be the biggest
public offering of 2012. It could also potentially be the biggest of
the current decade, if rumors of a reported $100 billion valuation and $10 billion raise are accurate. That would put Facebook in the top-three American IPOs for highest amounts raised.
Of course, an astronomical target does not mean a guaranteed blockbuster IPO for Facebook. Zynga’s unspectacular debut on the public markets in December has some investor’s worried that social media IPOs
will generate less enthusiasm going forward, and that could affect
Facebook in 2012. “It’s a very telltale sign of how people feel about
social media IPOs in general,” Jeffrey Sica, owner of Sica Wealth
Management in Morristown, N.J., told Mashable. “[Investors] have become very shortsighted. There’s a lot of fear in the market right now.”
Furthermore, today’s tech companies are raising larger rounds of
private money more frequently before going to IPO, and are allowing
private investors to trade shares prior to going public. That’s adding
up to less opportunity for public investors once the offering hits the market. This is another reason why there was lower-than-expected interest
from retail investors for Zynga, and could also be indicative of a
lackluster future debut for Facebook, which has raised a whopping $2.3 billion from private investors.
It’s unclear what this trend of raising mega-sized rounds of private
equity means for public capital markets long term. However, it is clear
that entrepreneurs and early employees of the few tech companies
attracting this sort of attention are reaping the benefits. And
aftermarket stock sales have allowed some early employees and investors
to cash in, pre-IPO. Facebook has already minted a number of on-paper
billionaires that way. If the company’s IPO in 2012 is as successful at
the rumored $100 billion valuation, Reuter’s estimates that Facebook will be home to at least 1,000 new millionaires.
The Next Steve Jobs?
Shortly after Apple’s iconic co-founder Steve Jobs died in October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook profile,
“Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing
that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.”
Mashable executive editor Adam Ostrow wrote following Jobs’s
death, “Although Apple and Facebook have had a contentious relationship,
it’s hard not to draw comparisons between Jobs and Zuckerberg, both of
whom dropped out of college and founded their iconic companies in their
early twenties.”
Indeed, even before Jobs died, there was a sense that his retirement from Apple
as CEO was a symbolic passing of the mantle to unofficial Innovator in
Chief in Silicon Valley, and to the tech world in general. But to whom?
Many pundits have prognosticated on that question and the answer usually comes down to one of four choices: someone we haven’t heard of yet, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg.
When people ask, “Who is the next Steve Jobs?” they mean, from where
will the next giant of the tech industry emerge? Who will be the next
larger-than-life figure to drive innovation in tech, design and business
for the next few decades? It might not necessarily be anyone from the
current crop of big company tech CEOs, but of the candidates, a good
case could be made for Zuckerberg. That has a lot less to do with
Zuckerberg’s potential as a Jobs impersonator (though he is getting
better at channeling Jobs’ confidence on stage), and more to do with his
place among the next generation’s influencers.
Zuckerberg’s performance at the f8 Developer Conference this year, which included an on-stage lampooning from Saturday Night Live
star Andy Samberg, illustrates Zuckberg’s generational advantage. Even
though he clearly tries to match Steve Jobs’s charisma, his style is
clearly not a one-to-one emulation — and that’s okay. In fact,
that’s exactly why Zuckerberg might be the next Jobs: He understands his
consumers in ways that competitors have yet to grasp, and that edge has
helped him to win the innovation war in social networking thus far.
Facebook vs. The World
Facebook has been on a collision course with the world’s biggest tech
companies for a long time, and that could all come to a head in 2012.
The company will fight Apple in the mobile space, where a focus on HTML5 and a recent acquisition
of mobile platform developer Strobe (makers of SproutCore) is
positioning Facebook to be a powerhouse in the mobile space, ideally by
delivering a rich user experience across hardware platforms. One big
advantage Facebook can offer that other platforms can’t? Massive
amounts of social data and one of the biggest installed user bases on
the planet.
Facebook will fight Amazon and eBay
in the consumer space, with the continued expansion of Facebook
Credits, which are already being used to sell all sorts of digital
content, from in-game items to movie downloads. For now, Credits can’t
be used in the purchase or sale of physical goods, but as retailers like
Amazon expand their footprint into digital, they’ll start start to bump
into Facebook. And Facebook credits are already sold in stores. Therefore, using them for physical purchases might not be far behind, especially as they get added to mobile payment systems.
And they’ll fight Google on virtually all fronts. Both Facebook and
Google are advertising-driven businesses, but Facebook’s revenue is a
drop in the bucket compared to Google’s. That could significantly start
to change in 2012, as Facebook rolls out new ad formats and more agencies shift traditional media buys to online advertising. Yet Facebook does face an uphill battle when it comes to convincing big brands to pay for advertising products when they’re accustomed to free Facebook Pages .
Facebook Becomes the Media
Somewhat lost amidst Facebook’s new Timeline buzz, three other
developments in 2011 fueled Facebook’s aspiration to become the
destination for all media. First, Facebook launched an update to its
Open Graph protocol called Gestures,
which essentially allows users to [verb] any [noun]. Or in other
words, websites are no longer constrained to just allowing users to Like
items. Now users can read, watch, listen or perform any other action
around the web.
Second, Facebook launched a new Subscribe feature, allowing users to let fans follow their public updates (and it’s coming soon for websites).
Third, Facebook offered an update to the News Feed called Ticker,
that serves as a real-time feed of activity away from Facebook. Taken
in tandem, these updates indicate Facebook’s growing desire to be to
discovery what Google is to search — that is, the market leader for the
new dominant form of currency on the web. In the previous decade, the
link was the main way to pass information around on the Internet.
Google figured out how to harness that information and turn it into a
highly useful search engine. In today’s social media-driven world, the
link is being replaced by the social recommendation (and more broadly,
by the social action), and Facebook is attempting to build a discovery
engine around that idea.
In other words, Facebook isn’t going to be a creator of media, but it will be the ultimate curator.
The Future of Timeline
Of course, that hoopla for Timeline
was warranted. Facebook’s radical redesign of the profile page marked a
huge departure from the traditional design, which in spite of numerous
changes and updates, had maintained the same basic UI concept since
Facebook launched.
The new Timeline
is about storytelling. “Timeline is the story of your life,” said
Zuckerberg at the f8 Conference. It’s a “new way to express who you
are.”
That, of course, gets to the heart of Facebook’s oft-stated goal to
make the world “more open and connected.” Here is a new profile that
encourages you to share even more about your life by documenting and
organizing everything you do. (Not coincidentally, that also plays right
into Facebook’s advertising-fueled business model.)
What happens to Timeline in 2012 would be as difficult to predict as
Timeline itself would have been this time last year, but it’s safe to
assume that Facebook’s recent acquisition of Gowalla
will have an impact on the future of the site’s profile design. With
Gowalla, Facebook acquired a team of designers and developers that had
created an unquestionably beautiful location-based social network with
the stated purpose of helping users document their travel (both locally
and abroad). Put another way, Gowalla was made for telling stories
about the places you went.
Facebook didn’t specifically acquire the technology behind Gowalla,
but it did say that it was “sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla
will make its way into Facebook over time.” Smart money is that parts
of that “inspiration” will find its way into Facebook as improvements to
the storytelling functionality of Facebook Timeline and Facebook’s
mobile applications.
Special thanks to Brian Carter, author of “The Like Economy,” who helped me codify my thoughts about the future of Facebook.
[source Mashable]
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment