As the article stated, it's difficult to overcome the "grandma factor" -- once something becomes so pervasive as to be near-universal, even among persons unlikely to be clued in, its cool factor is diminished if not completely obliterated.
Some groups actively crave differentiation, and teenagers seeking to assert their independence are prominent among them. It can be difficult to express and explore in the way teenagers seek when you know all your grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, cousins, second cousins, etc. will be reading, as they surely will when you post on Facebook.
As a 19 year old, I will say that from my perspective, this "coolness" factor is seriously overblown and misunderstood. Facebook was never "cool," even when I first got Facebook back in 9th grade, when I was around 14 years old. Facebook was always a highly addictive and vital necessity - a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction. It was never cool and I never saw how coolness or differentiation had anything to do with it.
Likewise, Snapchat is not "cool." Snapchat is pretty maisntream now (among my peers). It's popular because it's fun. All my peers use Snapchat as picture messaging for frivolous photos you wouldn't put on Facebook/Instagram.
A bit blunt but, yeah. Facebook was arguably a lot more cool when you at least needed an .edu address to get on. (Or a bit before or after that point depending on your perspective.)
Yes, but my point is that Facebook's ascendancy extended well into the period after Facebook lost it's "coolness," so concerns over FB's decline are overblown.
The thing I find interesting about referring to Facebook as a social utility is how different that angle is than just being "social" and that's it.
Instagram (and others) may be more "cool" at this point than Facebook, but they absolutely do not provide the same level of usefulness. Private messages, events with invitations, groups, the level of organization for photos, etc all together in one place connected to everyone you care about is indeed "useful." It's just straight up inefficient to organize events and share specific information on Instagram, Twitter or like services. It's because of this I feel they will continue to thrive, as teens will still use them for the "utility" and other services for the new, trendy social interactions.
"a social utility, the lack of which meant losing touch with friends, not being invited to events, and generally missing out on a large amount of social interaction"
And according to the article (and my own, admittedly limited, survey of teens and "tweens" I know), that utility value doesn't exist anymore. Now, you could argue that the thing they are moving to is also facebook under a different name (instagram)... but I suspect it would be just as ephemeral as a "required" social network as the facebook itself has proven to be.
I actually think the value increases as you get older (through college-aged), as your social networks fragment and split off.
When I was in high school my FB friends were mostly people I saw day-to-day anyway, so FB merely consisted of keeping in the loop with the social activity of people I would see in person every day anyway. So I can totally understand why once-core FB activities are moving to Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter, as a sort of unbundling function (in the sense that each service separately does a slice of FB).
But now that I'm off to college, FB is the only way I keep in meaningful touch with people from HS, people I've met randomly over the years, people from summer programs, etc.
I just don't share this vision. You either have -real- friends, or you have acquaintances. Facebook is not for real friends. If people are your friends and want to stay in contact with you, they will - like they did before Facebook existed.
Just outside the village where I grew up there's a hill called America Hill. Two brothers walked up that hill together, then said goodbye walked down opposite sides, because one was going to America, and both knew they'd never see each other again.
Maybe in other villages there were other brothers who cared more about each other, and so one stayed who would rather have gone, or went who would rather have stayed. But I don't think that's a particularly positive view to take.
If facebook allows us to remain friends with more people, rather than ruthlessly pruning our friendships down to the few we can maintain purely in person, surely that's a good thing.
You might as well argue that a telephone isn't for "real" friends that you see in the street every day. The truth of a modern lifestyle is that people are very mobile. I can remember losing touch with people for a few years back when your email address was from your college or employer, two moves and you were gone - until the world agreed that we'd use Facebook as a self-updating address book.
until the world agreed that we'd use Facebook as a self-updating address book
And that's a valuable function, and I suspect probably the reason Facebook has seen the longevity it has.
It seems very vulnerable to disruption, though. Given a self-updated directory that others can use to find you if you change contact details, and maybe given also a single sign-on mechanism that you can use with arbitrary, separate services like photo sharing and gaming, what is Facebook's USP?
Their biggest barrier to competition has for a long time been the "everyone is on Facebook" networking effect. If it's only the occasional dissenter who isn't, then organising stuff and communicating using Facebook is easier than many alternatives, whatever Facebook does to their UI/UX/privacy policy. As soon as a significant fraction of people you actually care about aren't on Facebook any more -- and significant in this context doesn't need to be anything like the majority -- that compelling advantage just evaporates.
(Yes, I'm a Facebook dissenter as an individual, and a sceptic about the long-term viability of their business in its current form as an investor.)
exactly! Fb is useful when you have a long list of friends from different places and phases of your life, like HS, college, summer camps, events, trips, etc. You cant keep in touch with them all the time on chat apps, simply because you dont always have something to talk about. Its nota a "real" friend or not issue, it's simply a matter of not having things to talk about. But on FB, you can come across some interesting post by that person, and connect over that.
Facebooks is priced at 240X Price to Earnings. If they start losing users or even stop growing its hard to imagine how that PE ratio continues to makes any sense. Even with an increase in mobile revenue its still less then desktop revenue and users are certainly flocking to mobile too which is a double wammy. So facebook has to transition to making more money per user if its user base stops growing. Otherwise you're going to have people really questioning the price of the stock which could end up effecting the whole industry.
The only way that valuation made sense is if facebook managed to capture an enormous fraction of all worldwide ad revenue. That always seemed extremely unlikely to me.
OP is only giving half the story. FB earnings are, in a sense, artificially low. They are dumping money into expanding and growing. FB wants good earnings but, right now, that's not as important as growing users and use. Of course there will always be money spent on growth but to what extent. When they go from dumping money into growth, P/E will be more meaningful in the typical sense.
Yes, they are growing. They are expanding their revenue. They have to in order to justify their valuation. But they need to grow at unsustainable rates for a fairly long time for that valuation to make sense. Unless they completely pivot the company they would, as I mentioned, need to grab significant fraction of all of Earth's advertising revenue, in all media. It's unreasonable to assume that current share holders are investing in facebook out of some belief in an unannounced, unplanned, speculative pivot into a different industry, that's either clairvoyance or rank stupidity.
Investing in growth is only an excuse for high PE if you are growing though, if the trend in the article continues and they maintain this PE ratio then maybe they're throwing good money after bad
Facebooks is priced at 240X Price to Earnings. If they start losing users or even stop growing its hard to imagine how that PE ratio continues to makes any sense.
Does a 240x P/E ever make sense? Maybe if you just patented a fix for global warming or a cure for a common cancer or something of that sort of magnitude, but for a non-essential technology company?
I know only a few very successful investors, both professional and private, and I've often asked them how they do it. Almost invariably, the answer is that they do their homework, use common sense, and play the long game rather than trying to beat the short-term markets. A recurring theme on the common sense score is that they have a personal threshold for P/E above which they will just walk away. None of these people I know would invest at 24x, other than under exceptional circumstances. At 240x, they'd be seriously considering shorting the stock.
In Facebook's case, the maths is disturbing: to justify a 240 P/E objectively, they need to double revenues year-on-year for about 7 years just to break even. Unfortunately, in less than 3 of those years, they've run out of people in the world they can sign up to advertise to, so even if they could sign up everyone in the entire world they would still need to figure out how to make about 20x as much money per user depending on how you count inflation.
Of course there is an argument that Facebook's P/E is artificially low because growth and mobile and stuff, but if you're spending 95% of your revenues just to keep things going and attract new users, and the idealised global market for your service is less than 7x your current user base, that still looks like you're doing it wrong from here.
I am genuinely curious here: Can anyone suggest a sound reason why they would buy into Facebook at the current price, other than as a speculative short-term investment? Put another way, is anything keeping FB's stock price up other than a bubble effect?
>At 240x, they'd be seriously considering shorting the stock.
I have associates involved in the management of a hedge fund, and they inform me that shorts are so highly demanded for the web IPOs of 2011 and 2012 that they've actually had trouble getting them.
Most professional investors aren't buying the hype this time around, I think. Even Facebook's IPO last year vastly underperformed. The consequences of the inevitable fold of Facebook will be very interesting.
I have associates involved in the management of a hedge fund, and they inform me that shorts are so highly demanded for the web IPOs of 2011 and 2012 that they've actually had trouble getting them.
Interesting anecdote. I'm not surprised that this is the case, but I'm surprised that it's the first time I've seen anyone mention it in a discussion.
So it is misleading to make conclusions from a PE ratio at any given time, simply because earnings for any particular quarter or even year is very situational. If for perfectly legitimate reasons (say to fuel growth) my earnings this quarter are $1, then my P/E ratio might be astronomical. In the context of pro-forma financials, taking out one time costs and special events, my P/E ratio is more telling. Amazon is a great example of this. There are quarters where AMZN has negative earnings. Does that mean that Amazon is overvalued? Not necessarily. Dig a bit deeper, take out things like acquisitions and restructuring costs for example, take earnings over time and that will give you a much stronger case to make a decision on valuation.
I don't know Facebook's details, but in theory another possibility to lower P/E: "Stop pouring money into expansion, to lower expenses and increase bottom-line earnings."
For example, Amazon could certainly do that, since they spend heavily on expansion
That is an important aspect, but let's consider the P/S (price/sales) ratio to gauge that savings potential:
Facebook: 22.3
Google: 5.9
Amazon: 2.3
(source: money.msn.com)
Of course, comparing to Amazon doesn't make sense. Retailers are always going to have very low margins and low P/S ratios. But comparing to Google does make sense. Assuming Facebook's potential margins are similar to Google's, Facebook would have to have incredible sales growth or incredible cost cutting in order to lower their P/E significantly.
I think it may be possible for Facebook to achieve that goal. People will put up with incredible levels of spam and harrassment in exchange for not losing "friends". So they might be able sell four times as many ads as they do now and cut costs dramatically on top of it.
Of course, the simple solution is to charge users a small annual fee for advanced features if not even for basic account maintenance. Your FB profile would become read-only if you don't pay an annual fee.
It's always so intriguing to me that people cling so hard to the ad-supported models even though it's shown that they simply don't work except in anomalous cases, not even for Facebook, which surely receives humongous portions of all net users' attention. It's not a good starting strategy for anyone, and it appears that it's not a good long-term strategy even for the lottery winners that have actually "made money" from it heretofore.
But the flip side is, as soon as they stop investing in expansion, the market will immediately start to wonder if their P/E is justified and might cause a decline in price. The signal from the market to Facebook now is that the shareholders want to invest in growth. And given FB's dominance, size, and talent, it's hard to argue otherwise. Facebook could still change a lot, and I think we're only seeing the beginning of social sharing/search/commerce/media into our lives.
That's a pretty generic signal - shareholders always want to invest in growth. The problem Facebook has is that ridiculous P/E makes them a bad buy if you would be happy with dividends, which means growth is their only option.
Normally you use this when there is a fact in dispute (on Reddit, not here). There are no facts in question in the comment you're responding to. There are arguments you may disagree with, but you don't need a citation to make an argument.
At the peak of the CB "bubble" around 1978, roughly 10% of all cars had a CB radio installed in them as a lower bound, although claims were it was higher, like 15% to 20%.
That percentage has dropped somewhat since then...
There is no particular reason to assume the peaking and decline of a socializing technology must result in its similar competitors growth in a nearly identical field. It could be home video conferencing or terminals built into vehicle seatbacks or far more likely, something we can't imagine at this time.
And no, for you youngsters, the smartphone was not the social technology replacement for CB, for basically all of the 80s and a substantial part of the 90s average people simply completely stopped technologically socializing in their cars. I see no reason to prevent future people from simply not socializing via handheld devices.
That doesn't mean the death of the industry, truck drivers still have CBs, but your grandpa probably does not (not since Carter was president, anyway)
The industry can only make money on the up slope, but investors and innovators can make money on both up and down slopes. Might be time to start thinking of money making schemes for the down slope.
I never played with CB other than low power walkie talkies from radio shack. I did get into amateur radio in 2003 and do have a radio that can be mounted in the car. There seems to be quite a lot of activity on the air where I live. It's still a fun hobby in 2013 and is a nice break from the daily grind of the internet startup scene. It's funny how different various subcultures are - even among technical people.
Even just within ham radio the subcultures are pretty wide, there's the HF guys, the digital mode guys, the contesters, the microwave builder/experimenters, the public service volunteer guys, the dxpedition ops, the antenna system designers, the satellite/moonbounce ops... The good news is it only takes several decades experience (and $$$$$$) to try everything by which time someone's gone and invented something new.
Teens are attracted to Twitter, Instagram and Vine. They like these mini social network where they could gain followers by posing interesting tweets or photos or videos.
Youtube's top celerity usually started their channels when they were teen (high school, freshman). Certainly getting your channel popular now is harder, so the best way to get attention is either by posting photos or posting a 6-second videos.
Vine and Instavideos took the spike. Kids are spending more time watching videos and looking at photos than reading statuses.
Ironically, IMO, Vine and instavideos took off partly because people could publish to FB and Twitter. I spend most of my FB time either reading memes or vine videos. i don't pay much attention to status anymore.
I noticed this as well. Personally I feel that twitter/instagram/vine is more informal and disposable. Facebook and its albums, status, friend lists, etc., it's all so formal to the point of being old-fashioned.
It feels like the current zeitgeist is not to give a crap about anything older than a few hours. Instagram feels like it's only about about making "now" look cool, hash-tagging it and then forgetting about it. Vine gives you a few seconds of entertainment, about the threshold at when boredom kicks in.
Honestly about 99.999% of the time I never re-read a tweet, look at the same instagram or vine. It's disposable social media. Facebook feels like the exact opposite.
I think that's probably a large reason along with two others:
They're more content focused. Twitter is about what people write, Instagram is about the pictures people take. Facebook is about... the network? Facebook is more muddled, and clarity is valued today.
Asymmetry. Yes, I know you can "like" things and get updates and you can join groups, but ultimately the relationship between two users on Facebook has to be agreed to by both.
Or so they think ... until one of those kids grows up, runs for office, and the press digs through their twitter archive to dig up evidence of teenage bad decisions.
Vines is going to crash hard suddenly IMO. At it's core it's just not versatile enough for anyone to actually try and become "popular" from Vines videos - what you do their, you can do on YouTube as well, but with more versatility. You can't do much with 5 second videos as a limit - but the 5 second movie/10 second movie etc. was a format that people were using on YouTube well before Vines.
Maybe. I think there is a value running a 5-10 seconds show. It's supposed to be funny, capturing attention. Youtube to me and possibly to many people is formal, it's a website you go to for a full talk. You would watch a 5 minutes show instead. This is why you don't blog on twitter. You write status and you chat and that's "blog" for some people.
Since vine is a twitter company, I am sure twitter is trying to monetize it.
5 seconds is about how long it took to read this sentence and move your eyes to the next one.
The problem is, a video, unlike a picture, or indeed - text, doesn't linger on a frame naturally.
Your example seems to support my point more then undermine it too - you mention 5 minutes. Not 5 seconds. 5 minutes is a lot of content's length on YouTube. Its not remotely possible on Vine.
> However, teenagers have made it clear with their quick adoption of social networks such as Instagram and Snapchat they want to share everything and with as many people as possible.
Alternative explanation - teens want to share ephemerally and with a certain degree of anonymity. They don't want their parents looking over their shoulder at their friends or conversations, and seek to avoid entanglement with sections of their social network that are going to bully them or have a significantly lasting effect tied to a persistent searchable identity.
The lack of anonymity and pseudonymity on Facebook is definitely a factor. Facebook works under the assumption that we have one unified "identity" to which we can and want to tie everything we do. In reality, we share different parts of ourselves with different people at different times.
As more teenagers gravitate toward online social networks (if not Facebook, then Instagram, etc.), I'm concerned that not enough of them will feel lonely.
I recently watched a Louis C.K. interview about young people and technology, which struck a chord with me. I agree that adolescents benefit from a sense of boredom and isolation because it encourages them to cultivate stronger in-person social networks:
What the parent comment is trying to get at is that many people today do not know how to sit quietly alone with their thoughts. If they have a single spare moment, in less than half a second they whip out their phones and mindlessly check fb, etc. Due to this, they are less pensive and self reflective. While hard to test, it seems like a reasonable theory.
Haven't you noticed it yourself, that especially younger people seem to be engaged with their mobile devices whenever there is a few minute idle time, when e.g. waiting for a class to start. Quiet hallway, 10-20 people, all but a few with their noses in their phones.
It is bad in the sense that it is an alternative, and growingly a replacement, to using our biological escape from Reality - the Imagination.
Actively engaging the Imagination has a much greater potential to cross over into Reality and affect it in such a way that escape is no longer necessary. Escaping from Reality by relying on external input feeds and output sinks only passively engages the Imagination and does not produce the same internal Imagination-Reality-Manifestation loop.
As with most things, a healthy balance of both internal and external escapism is probably the best. Calvin and Hobbes explains this the best.
Right. First someone says that isolation is good for adolescencents citing a comedian, you are arguing that mix of external and internal escapism is probably the best as the comic explains. I am not a subject matter expert, but comics are not an authority on psychology for me.
Authoritarianism is not much of an argument. None the less, I'll see your making fun of comedians (and who is better to comment on the human condition than a comedian?) and raise the stakes to Zen Buddhism. "And Buddha said, the eightfold path to enlightenment begins with posting to your facebook wall and ends with spend lots of time making your linkedin profile look pretty" Oh no wait maybe I misquoted.
I have observed as I get older that teens suffer from many self caused maladies, although an excess of calm introspection has never made that top 10 list. Given observation that teens are legendary for causing enormous amounts of suffering because of a lack of even a tiny amount of thinking, that would imply the scales are likely tipped far in excess away from a healthy level of introspection. Its unlikely given an extreme situation that a return to something approaching normal would be seriously controversial.
I hugely respect Buddhist philosphy but quoting eight fold path in a discussion about addiction to our gadgets is a non sequitur.
Do you know who is better to comment on the human condition?
Actual scientists who study human mind. And while psychology doesn't conform to some principles of scientific rigor it produces useful models for improving human condition. They often fail, but it is much better than intuition, comedian's intuition included.
The argument you mention is mine, I was not directly attributing it to the comic. I mentioned the comic because I think it has many great examples of the subject being discussed (see Calvin's relationship with watching TV, in contrast to his relationship with his cardboard box and stuffed tiger).
I don't know what exactly constitutes an "authority" on psychology. If it is a degree in the subject - I have one and its weight is negligible. If it is amount of material published regarding the human condition - Bill Watterson is an authority in the eyes of the many who regularly cite his work, as are many other comedians, artists and writers.
However, last I checked, there is no prevailing general model of the human psyche (nor one for the biomechanism of the brain). Appeals to authority may be taking a while.
Published papers in psychology journals are authoritative sources for information.
I tried googling for information related to Bill Watterson and psychology and couldn't find any links to the relevant information. I am sure that comedy has a lot of insights to offer scientists who study human mind, but I really dont understand why psychologists and/or psychiatrists cite his work. I would like to be proven wrong, could you direct me to the relevant interesting bits of information?
"The findings revealed that social isolation was associated with an increased risk for depressive symptoms, suicide attempts, and low self-esteem."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17849936
Didn't Zuck say recently that the actual numbers weren't concerning, and that they're aware they are past the "cool" stage and instead want to move on to become the social fabric of the Internet, much like a utility.
Err, what? If I closed my facebook account I would lose virtually all contact I have with every friend I have made other than the person I live with and a few people who live near me and my family. How the hell is that not utility?
This is how it used to be. You graduate high school/college and you loose touch with the people who were unimportant, keep in touch with the people who are important.
I don't really see this as a problem. The people who you wouldn't loose contact with are the ones worth focusing on, because it means you actually care about them.
It's not really Facebook offering utility though. They offer the same features every other site trying to be the "fabric of the internet" offers and some would say not as much. It just so happens that everyone you know has a Facebook at the moment.
If I like watching birds and someone in my village puts up a bird feeder and all the birds go there and he offers to let me come and watch in return for a small payment then I would say that, while the birds are at his feeder, he is offering utility. This remains true even if all the other villagers also put up identical feeders which remain sadly birdless.
Whereas If I'm understanding you correctly, you would say that he is offering utility only if the birds are at his feeder because of some unique bird-attracting design features of his feeder which the other feeders lack.
That seems to me to be confusing an implementation detail with what actually matters to the user: he just wants access to birds (his friends). He doesn't care why they are where they are.
I don't even think that the reason is "Facebook isn't cool anymore". Facebook is just annoying at this point. When Facebook was for your friends from college and/or high school, things were great. You could post embarrassing things that people did, inside jokes, whatever. Now your mom is on Facebook. your grandma is on Facebook, and so is your boss. Yes you can stop them from seeing everything you post or everything your friends post, but no one knows that. There's probably a 50/50 chance that if I were to post something funny and slightly embarrassing on a friends wall, BAM, there's their grandma who is a tad bit confused. Then of course your friends grow up and all they post is baby pictures.
Teenagers, who are looking to keep things private between them and their friends, can't have their mom popping up on their Facebook pages all the time.
1) _Teenagers in general_ do not use Facebook (which does _not_ rule out that they will become avid Facebook users once they grow out of their teenage years)
2) _Today's teenagers_ disinterest in Facebook is fundamentally different than it was for teenagers' of several years ago (which would suggest they'll never get attached to Facebook the way previous teenagers once did, and therefore never become avid Facebook users).
The 10-K report suggests #2 ("younger users were less engaged with the social network than previously") but my hunch is that it's more like #1 (I argued this here: http://whoo.ps/2013/03/04/teens-go-where-identity-isnt).
Teenagers now have more social networking options (Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) to choose from than previous generations of teenagers - which explains why today's teenagers are less engaged with Facebook than previously - but that doesn't mean they won't want/need the kind of canonical identity that Facebook provides (once that awkward, impressionable teenager actually grows into an adult with a firmer identify).
For those referring to the social utility of Facebook, I recommend hiding your news feed. The newsfeed is not a social utility, whereas messages, profiles, looking up mutual friends, etc. IS a social utility. Here's how to hide your newsfeed without affecting your experience on the rest of the site:
I suppose the coming months/years will be when we see whether Facebook becomes the "backbone of the social Internet" or just another MySpace. I honestly don't know where the smart money is here-- it's an exciting time!
Aren't Instagram and Snapchat completely different products? Of course, these compete on the 'share of time' of the users, in which case everything teens do is competing with Facebook.
They've been losing teens for a while now, and once you start losing teens, a so-called "social networking" website is dead, it doesn't know it yet because the agony may take a while.
Due to its unusual size for facebook it might take a longer while, but it's on the path to irrelevance that many others have walked before: friendster, myspace, msn, etc.
it's funy that the 10-13 years demographics adoption will make or kill an online website.
As a teenager, Twitter is what everyone is using currently. Don't complicate it, teens just want to be on what their friends are on, and their parents are not on.
Some groups actively crave differentiation, and teenagers seeking to assert their independence are prominent among them. It can be difficult to express and explore in the way teenagers seek when you know all your grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts, great uncles, great aunts, cousins, second cousins, etc. will be reading, as they surely will when you post on Facebook.