Fascinating question, that. It might be hard to conceive of a time when Facebook doesn’t exist anymore, or maybe exists in the same way that Myspace does – as a floundering shell of its former self. After all, Facebook has more than 900 million users worldwide, and that doesn’t even include China, where it’s not allowed. With a world population of just over 7 billion, that comes to around one Facebook account for every eight people on the planet. That’s a pretty impressive rate of saturation.
So the original question bears repeating: What could kill a behemoth that size? The answer is one word: mobile. In order to understand that, it helps to know a little about how Facebook operates. Most of those 900 million users are everyday folks who want to share photos, stories, and events with friends. Those users are the primary source of revenue for Facebook. Or rather, their data is. Facebook makes about 80% of its profits from selling ads targeted with that data that show up all over the site. They get paid anytime someone clicks on one of those ads.
The trouble is that on most mobile devices (smartphones and such), there isn’t enough real estate on the screen to show all those ads and still give the user a good experience. And guess what? The use of mobile devices for access to Facebook (and the internet in general) is exploding. As more and more people switch to mobile as their first choice for Facebook, ad revenues will drop significantly. And when a company stops making money, well… we know what happens.
There’s always the chance that Facebook will figure out a way to make money through their mobile app. Then again, maybe not. They started out with a traditional computer model and who knows if they’ll be able to make the shift? There’s probably just as good a chance that some upstart will come along with a product that wasn’t just adapted to mobile but created for mobile, and that could be the Facebook killer.
What Will Kill Facebook?
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