Re:Zuckerberg struggles to name a single Facebook competitor
by Broken_Hippo on Wednesday April 11, 2018 @06:54AM
(#16809788)
That's not the entire story though. Facebook has multiple products and multiple layers of folks to sell to.
On one layer, they offer a social networking site to people, who become users. Then they take the information and sell it to advertisers to make money. Without the social networking site, Facebook wouldn't have its advertising business. There are more, I'm sure (governments are sometimes customers, for example).
There is only light competition for the advertising right now, but I'm going to guess we'll figure that stuff out as time goes on.
As far as the social networking itself, there are options, but none that can replace facebook's user functionality. There isn't anywhere robust enough to make change feasible. Instead, you can replace parts of facebook with other things and get partial functionality Your mother probably won't download a weird app just to talk to you instead of using messenger, for example, and your sister probably won't send you the pictures of the kids as often.
On one layer, they offer a social networking site to people, who become users. Then they take the information and sell it to advertisers to make money. Without the social networking site, Facebook wouldn't have its advertising business. There are more, I'm sure (governments are sometimes customers, for example).
There is only light competition for the advertising right now, but I'm going to guess we'll figure that stuff out as time goes on.
As far as the social networking itself, there are options, but none that can replace facebook's user functionality. There isn't anywhere robust enough to make change feasible. Instead, you can replace parts of facebook with other things and get partial functionality Your mother probably won't download a weird app just to talk to you instead of using messenger, for example, and your sister probably won't send you the pictures of the kids as often.