Even though Facebook is endeavoring to stay on the top by acquiring Gowalla, Instagram, Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox and Karma, some analysts predict that Facebook will sink to the bottom and rest in peace within this decade.
A social analyst Eric Jacson – founder of Ironfire Capital – said addressing Facebook:
“Yahoo is still making money, it’s still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it, but it’s 10 percent of the value that it was at the height of 2000. For all intents and purposes, it’s disappeared. In 5 to 8 years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared.”
“Facebook can buy a bunch of mobile companies, but they are still a big, fat website and that’s different from a mobile app.”, Jacson added.
Though Jacson has closely monitored Facebook’s current status, strategy and future goals before passing such statement, there might be many other possible reasons that might lead to the Jacosn’s prediction but with a little twist and change. Undoubtedly, its difficult to predict the future of a company which holds the largest share of online community but there are many factors, in current scenario, pertaining to Facebook future pitfalls.
Facebook IPO failure:
It was seen that after such a hype for Facebook IPO, within two weeks, the stock rates fell down to $26.83 from an initial offering price of $38. Even most of the analysts predicted this. Facebook and Morgan had to face the lawsuit for misleading and they were held responsible for incurring loss to the public share holders. You can look at the graph below by NasdaqGS showing the decline of Facebook price on June 1st.
50% of Americans think – Facebook is a fad:
Nearly about half of the Americans considered Facebook as fad as per the survey conducted on 1000 Americans. But still 43% feel that Facebook will continue its journey.This might haunt Facebook in future. Following is a representation of the opinion of  Americans on various popular companies by Associated Press & CNBC.
You can see that only 51% are favoring Facebook. Having said that, we should also consider the fact that there are over 901 million users worldwide.
Facebook’s ad revenue via mobile:
We all know that more and more users are moving over to smartphone usage. Facebook’s main revenue source is from ads alone and Facebook has not yet figured a success strategy to generate ad revenue via mobile devices. A recent report by comScore’s new Mobile Metrix 2.0 showed U.S. smartphone users spent 441 minutes per month or 7 hours & 21 minutes, on Facebook in March, compared with 391 minutes via computer.
But the question is that even though Facebook is engaging users in smartphones, how much ad revenue did Facebook actually get out of those mobile penetration hours. And Facebook should note down that the rivals are ahead in generating ad revenue via mobile.
According to a poll conducted by reuters, 4 out of 5 Facebook users told that they never got influenced by the ads to actually purchase products.
Competition:
Facebook has managed to stay on top of the roof, but for how long? Websites like Pinterest is growing at a very fast rate.
For instance Facebook overtook Myspace – leader in social media once – and overran “Orkut” in India and Brazil. Now there is a huge competition going on in the market with emergence of many new Social networking sites. Entrepreneurs are constantly eyeing for the right time to launch their services and just not that; they are also waiting for the pitfall of the giants of respective industry. Therefore, there is a fair chance that some lucky mascot may overtake Facebook in the years to come.
Yet it cannot be perfectly concluded that Facebook will die down completely in next few years. Mark will really have to think out of the box to maintain its exponentially growing baby- which he has done superbly till now. But the wide road is just narrowing down apparently and he might be left with quite a few options in hand to keep the growth intact.
Whatever may be the situation, one things is pretty clear; there is nothing in this world which could stay afloat for ever with constant speed and power; so the Facebook. The Facebook die-heart fans should keep their finger crossed !
