How ephemeral is glory in the times of the knowledge economy. Not later than a year ago, the killer application of the market looked like Facebook, the queen of social networks capable of sending the "old" forms of communication to the end, from search engines (see Google) to portals, now smelling of prehistory (Yahoo!). But the championship of social networks has just begun. The headlines, at the end of May 2013, are all for Tumblr, the social (micro)blogging platform acquired by Yahoo! , one of the old Internet companies, for an astronomical sum: 1,1 billion. But Tumblr is the first, most serious threat on Facebook's horizon. Like Mark Zuckerberg's creature, it's a somewhat particular social network that facilitates the publication of images and videos and allows you to be updated on your friends' publications. But unlike Facebook and Twitter, however, it gives the possibility to greatly customize one's page, adding and removing the functions pre-established by the managers.
Therefore, there is a growing fear that younger users will fall out of love at the expense of other new applications social . Not only Tumblr but also Twitter, WhatsApp, Viper and so on. To confirm this, the Pew Research Center recently published a survey in which it confirms this trend: about 40% of American users between the ages of 18 and 29 say that in 2013 they will spend much less time connected to Facebook, an extremely worrying trend that affects the heart of the target users of social networks.
Wall Street, this time, anticipated the decline of the Facebook star with cynicism and ruthless realism: just a year ago, at the end of May, the founder of the Ironfire Capital hedge fund Eric Jackson had ventured to predict, from the CNBC television screens, that within 5-8 years Facebook will go from making history to being history. Doomed, that is, to the irrelevance of MySpace. Like Yahoo which, having plummeted to a tenth of the value marked in its glory days, now seemed doomed: up to the blit on Tumblr which, probably, indicates the obligatory path both for Facebook and for other giants in difficulty.
Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of shareholders who paid $16 billion in equity faced a deadweight loss of $5,5 billion: $38 to $24 for the stock, the fifth-worst performer among the 124 stocks that appeared. on the market in the last year. The worst ever for IPOs above 200 million dollars. A disaster, which has matured since the beginning, marked by mistakes and controversies. But now? Is it legitimate to hope for a resurrection?
The majority of investors remain skeptical and continue to hold the stock overvalued. Basically, there is still the fear that in the short term the company will not be able to recover from the stagnation that led it, with extreme delay, to concentrate on mobile platforms (smartphones and tablets) with applications and following the best practices for what today are the monopolizing systems of the market: theAndroid of Google and theiOS of Apple.
The accusation is that of having remained anchored to the platform for too long desktop with losing precious time against increasingly aggressive competitors in acquiring market shares in the Tech&Social business. All when advertising investments have been moving for some time now come on devices “fixed” to portable ones.
The same stagnation is also found in the development and launch of innovations and new technologies. In this regard, it brings to comparison Google which is experimenting with a new set of concepts ranging from the much-discussed Google Glasses, to the self-driving car and the continuous implementations of Android software. In short, Google no longer wants to be just "the" search engine and what does Facebook want to be when it grows up?
Some of the first initiatives undertaken, such as Facebook Home (the recreation of one's Facebook page on the home screen of one's smartphone), were unsuccessful. But the accounts allow us to nurture a certain optimism: the commitment that the company has begun to address to the market of mobile devices, has yielded a 30% growth in advertising sold on these platforms ($374 million) compared to Q1 2012. In this regard, EMarketer, a leading market research and analysis company, estimates that in 2014, Facebook's US market share in the sale of channel advertising mobile devices will be 13,3%. It should be considered that in 2011 this share was equal to zero. Conversely, revenue from advertising sales on platforms desktop with they remain flat at $871 million. It is certainly not the result envisaged a year ago and it is no coincidence that important investors, such as Accel Partners and Tiger Global HF, continue to sell Facebook shares.
The signals that the company must start sending in order for investors to click the famous "I Like" again must be long-term and, this time, with solid foundations for development.
