Being publicly-traded is a different ballgame. Sure, there is ‘candy’ in it (wealth creation
for founders, objective measure of company worth, glamour), but with the candy,
you have to take the spinach (constant pressure to meet guidance, expectations
of earnings growth, shareholder anger at falling stock price).
Facebook could have had the luxury of growing organically as
a private firm, finding its way to the RIGHT techniques to make a crap load of
money. PPC ads have not been the way to the fortune Facebook expected, so it
needs innovation to find those revenue-generating techniques. So having a
public company just increases the need for speed here. So now they are rolling
out initiatives such as Gifts, mobile ads, Sponsored Results, App Install ad
and Facebook Exchange (FBX).
Several of these have potential, as does an actual Facebook
web search engine. But didn’t most people think that just click ads would be a
bonanza for Facebook? So it remains to be seen if any of these will propel
Facebook to a revenue machine.
No comments:
Post a Comment