For Facebook new product but same question: How does the company turn all those users into dollars?
Facebook’s (FB) big announcement today, January 15, has turned into much ado about not very much.
The initial take was that Facebook would finally be getting into the search business. That would be a huge (eventual) challenge to Google (GOOG) since Facebook would be able, analysts projected, to generate search results that would be personalized by a users network of friends. Google’s shares initially fell as Facebook’s event began.
But it turns out that Facebook’s product, called Graph Search, isn’t a full-scale search engine. (Google shares moved up as investors digested that.)
Instead it is a narrow focus search that will allow users to search their network of friends for photos, people, places, and interests. That will put Facebook directly into competition with focused review aggregators such as Yelp (YELP.) On Facebook a search on Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles would pull up recommendations from Facebook friends of the user. That might be more useful than reviews on Yelp that come from strangers. Or depending on a user’s friends, of course, Yelp might offer considerably more information than a Facebook search for restaurant recommendations. This all led to selling pressure on stocks of companies such as Yelp, LinkedIn (LNKD) and Zinga (ZNGA.)
And then, as analysts focused on Facbook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vagueness (to be kind) about how Facebook might actually monetize Graph Search, Facebook shares themselves fell. “This could potentially be a business over time,” Zuckerberg said during the question and answer session.
It didn’t help either that the Graph Search as introduced today will run only on desktop computers. A version for mobile devices is something Facebook will work on next, Zuckerberg said. He did not give a timetable for delivering Graph Search to mobile devices.
In other words, Facebook’s big product introduction today, the company’s first since its IPO, didn’t really answer the big continuing question about Facebook: How will the company make money from its huge number of users?
Shares of Google closed up 0.05% for the day. Shares of Yelp were down 5.6%; and shares of Zinga were off 1.53%. LinkedIn closed with a 0.2% gain. Facebook itself retreated 2.42% on the day.
Full disclosure: I don’t own shares of any of the companies mentioned in this post in my personal portfolio. The mutual fund I manage, Jubak Global Equity Fund http://jubakfund.com/, may or may not now own positions in any stock mentioned in this post. The fund did not own shares of any stock mentioned in this post as of the end of September. For a full list of the stocks in the fund as of the end of September see the fund’s portfolio at http://jubakfund.com/about-the-fund/holdings/
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I write programs for semantic search.
Google had to overcome a lot of difficult technical problems: develop a high-speed crawler with frequent updating, filter out non-relevant HTML, build a huge inverted document-base with very fast search time, design efficient ranking algorithms, make that pull-down of previous searches from all users work fast enough (I still don’t know how it works).
Facebook just has a database of user-entered information, that it already searches for its own purposes, to recommend you new friends. They work with names all the time, which are easily extracted and typed from surrounding text.
So why don’t they just add the search features, which should take them 2 man-years, and show the market what they could do?
All looks like smoke and mirrors to me.