Courtesy: "Rangarajan T N C thr C H Mahadevan
Facebook is the new AOL
Just think about it for a minute. Of course Facebook
is the new AOL. Facebook is the beginning and the end of the internet
for a huge number of normal people, a combination of primary service
provider (user profiles, messaging, photo sharing) and '90s-style portal
to the wider web. Facebook has its own IM platform, Messenger, just
like AOL had AOL Instant Messenger. Then it went and bought WhatsApp,
the messaging platform more popular internationally, just like AOL
bought ICQ. Facebook groups are just AOL chat rooms; Facebook's
permanently doomed commerce plays are AOL's permanently doomed commerce
plays. (AOL's ultimate doomed ecommerce play? The acquisition of Netscape.)
And Facebook's core business of selling ads into the News
Feed is the same combination of incredibly vulnerable and
apocalypse-proof as AOL's dial-up business:
it will continue minting money for as long as the parents and
grandparents of the world start their day with Facebook, and it will
stop growing the second all of their kids move on to something better.
The only remaining move is for Facebook to up and buy a media company
You can keep going: Facebook is now pitching itself to media
companies as their savior, just as AOL once did. Most websites get a
tremendous amount of traffic from Facebook; it's only a matter of time
before Facebook starts aggressively charging for that traffic. And
there's word that Facebook even wants media companies to start publishing directly onto Facebook's platform,
ostensibly in the name of a better user experience — being kicked from
the Facebook app to a browser or web view on mobile kind of sucks, after
all. That's a play straight out of the AOL playbook; the only remaining
move is for Facebook to up and buy a media company of its own, just
like AOL spent the 90s building up to its disastrous January 2000
purchase of Time Warner.
You're laughing, but there's an old media company — probably
a cable network scared to death of YouTube — looking at Jeff Bezos
buying The Washington Post and thinking hard about how to sell itself to Facebook.
