Was it Mashable.com that did the study and found that almost every Facebook app was developed and marketed as a "just for fun" app?
I find more utility out of Twitter than I do Facebook; over the last year I've made four new friends on Twitter who live near me one of whom is about to let me rent a house from him. That's utility, and it's organic; I don't need some marketplace to look for someone to rent from. When you're capable of making connections just on location alone and let people do the work of becoming friends you've got something. And on that, Twitter beats out Facebook everytime.
I could not disagree more. Facebook is rapidly replacing email, phone, and other channels as the method that many people use to keep up with friends and family. My parents and literally hundreds of their friends have started using it over the last six months and now use it aggressively. These people are definitely not early adopters or anything...most of them are conservative midwesterners in their 40s and 50s, and most of them are very active on a daily basis, using everything from status updates to photo uploads.
Facebook hasn't figured out how to monetize their userbase yet, but the social utility value is enormous.
Maybe I'm naive to this new wave of web based business, but how has Facebook managed to partner up with Microsoft, and all of these other ad providers and not raise a single dime?
It is a self-updating white pages, and college organizations use groups in place of their own websites and mailing lists to great effect. When I want to invite 20 people to a poker tournament, text messages or facebook are the way. These things are all valuable to me.
But that doesn't mean that advertising is the right revenue model. Getting those guys to come over and pay $10 to play poker is about all the money you will get out of my group of friends on any given friday night. $5 is often the buy in as we get deeper into the semester.
I really think start ups need to stop being so adverse to charging money. The freemium model works. I don't buy a damn thing from the advertisers on facebook, but I paid $25 for the Remember the Milk app for my iPod because it is so valuable to me.
Granted, a lot of those people aren't close friends or family members. Many of them are people that my parents knew decades ago and have lost touch with. I actually think that one of the most valuable things about Facebook (and twitter) is that it allows you to more effortlessly keep in touch with more people than 1-to-1 communication methods like email, phone, IM, etc.
Hackers have a distorted view of things, because almost all of us are used to seeing the "big picture" of the Internet. We don't realize that most people use one or two web sites at most, and that for some people, Facebook IS the Internet.
But, yeah, I wasn't trying to downplay Facebook, but only agreeing that I'm one of those people who would be a Facebooker in name only if it weren't for Twitter, from which I get much greater utility.
And college students are a great demo to market to (they buy all sorts of things).
This is about Hulu coming out of the gates with ads, and having a big pile of salespeople who know how to sell ads for TV shows. The players involved all have existing relationships with entities who BUY video advertising... They have a fully-baked business model from stage 1.
Youtube is JUST starting to experiment with it (and trying to build a more innovative model than the existing "just toss in commercials" option.
In fact, eyeballs have never really equalled money. The ability to affect the things behind those eyeballs = money. Actually, the perception of businesses of the potential to affect the things behind those eyeballs = money.
Your right. Hulu hasn't really proven anything yet. They've proven that they can get ad buyers to buy online if presented with something similar enough to offline TV. You can build a reasonable business based on this model, apparently.
But it's true that Youtube hasn't proved anything yet business-wise.
Quality does count for something though. People will pay a higher CPM for 25-35 year old males than they will for 18-22.
American entrepreneurs should keep away from this market! THERE IS NO MONEY TO BE HAD HERE.
The U.S. has almost as much GDP as the entire EU, while having <40% of the population which, most importantly, means a lot more discretionary income.
I hope you didn't take my statements as jingoistic, it's just a well-known fact that U.S. users monetize much better than the rest of the world in general.
This is Facebook's underlying problem. All the network effects in the world just aren't as valuable as Facebook would like you to believe when the site is nearly all broke college students wasting time.