Facebook music dashboard: Revenue at last? We all know why Facebook has such astronomical valuations. It is already as ubiquitous as Tesco. It is a place a billion people go to: whereas they only ever leave Google search, to go somewhere else. But people hanging around, poking, throwing cows, ignoring the adverts and goofing around doesn’t pay the rent. To increase …
But of course, you'll actually be paying a fiver to be put on the list of people willing to pay a fiver, which is then sold both to the normal advertisers, and the advertisers looking for known payers.
Orlowski's contention that rapacious money-sievers will be content with one stream of money and forego another when they can have both while they dream up more, is bizarre and not supported by any modern business history I've ever seen.
First things first : I don't have a Face Book account. Don't want one and, as far as I know, don't need one.
I have a web page where I load all the pictures I want people to see and I have an email account, which is linked with my webpage. I pay a nominal amount for this.
What I have never really understood about Face Book is this : how do they make money ? Is advertising revenues really enough ? It is for Google, but I really do not know about Face Book. It seems to be popular because it is free, rather than the other way around.
If Face Book start adding "paid services" would people really start using and paying for them ? I really have my doubts. Yes, people are paying Apple, or through Apple, for software, but this is often, I think, for things people use. Like astronomy software, there is a need, a solution and a value. But in this world of open source, what could Face Book really offer that is not available for free somewhere, that people would pay for ?
And, using your music analogy, I am not sure who you are suggesting is paying whom ? Is person A going to pay 20p to share a song with B, or is B going to pay the fee to listen to something their friends thinks is 'kewl' ? I have no idea.
I read recently that Face Book was "worth" £8billion, maybe even more. Really ? I'm still not sure what it is for and even less sure how it will ever make money. A bit like Skype, except of course that Skype is alarmingly useful…...
I have a website ergo I am a global business...
this is all fine when you have a 'free to use' website (eg facebook) and make money from adverts etc - business to business transactions - easy to identify seller and buyer (and their location) but starts to get a little more complicated when you actually want to use said website as a platform - even more complicated when you are offering this platform for third parties and trying to link it into selling all manner of stuff.
Unfortunately, boring things like sales tax/vat; currencies; local laws; payment methods and merchant accounts all start to come into effect. For something like FB this becomes really complex - tonnes of users and annoymous so how would you determine which country they were in and if you were legally allowed to sell what you are selling in that country (eg as an example, gambling products would not be allowed to be sold to US customers). Then you get what price you sell at (could you sell to India at the same value you sell to Canada...)
Whilst these are not impossible problems to overcome it does make it slightly tougher to deal with (and extremely tough to launch with 750m users when you suddenly are opening yourself up to all manner of problems given a pretty much 100% worldwide user base)
This is one of the key points that a lot of the investors, commentators and users seem to miss on - the boring back office finance/admin style things which can't really be overcome with clever coding or marketing
Hell yes, I’d buy into this in a flash. Facebook is now the number one place I learn about new bands, with a lot of them offering free albums in the crush to get noticed.
If Facebook could set up a pay-as-you go style payment system similar to mobile phone top-ups, and charge a super-low price to add an album to your stream, I think they’d be onto a winner. They could even be crafty like Microsoft and invent their own currency to obscure how much you’re paying (I certainly rarely bother to work out how much buying a dancing monkey for my xbox avatar really costs in real money, and as a result impulse buying is more frequent – look at the monkey dance!).
Of course, they’d have to not take the piss on the price, I’d say 50p to add an album is about as high as they could go without causing people to question the value (since you’re not downloading anything), and if enough went to the bands this would be a godsend to the unsigned. The question, as always, is whether the established labels would go for it.
The problem is that consumers will pay for original content. Music from appropriate outlets, apps, news reporting from premium outlets - these are all things that people will pay for. Posting links, sharing jokes - these are things that people won't pay for, because they can do it for free. Facebook isn't an original content destination, hence having to try to tie in others' content and charge for that. It's ambitious, and I guess we'll see whether it's realistic...
Is capitalsim new to you? Most companies are in the business of making "as much money as possible", not "just enough to get by on". I'd imagine that it's quite possible to run a TV company on either subscriptions or adverts, but that doesn't stop Sky from having both.
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