Facebook: Gone in 5 to 8 Years?

Posted on Jun 5, 2012

Johann Larsson (CC BY 2.0)

“Facebook can buy a bunch of mobile companies, but they are still a big, fat website and that’s different from a mobile app,” Jackson said.

Facebook will go the way of Yahoo in less than a decade, becoming a relatively minor Internet company as the site struggles to adapt to the world of mobile Web surfing, says Eric Jackson, founder of a firm that works to boost the market value of fledgling companies.

CNBC:

Jackson said there have been three generations of web companies. The first generation was big web portals, such as Yahoo [YHOO 15.01   0.09 (+0.6%)  ], where content was aggregated in one place. The second was the social web with Facebook [FB 26.90   -0.82 (-2.96%)  ] and the third generation is companies focused entirely on monetizing the mobile platform, something Facebook will continue to struggle with, Jackson said.

“When you look over these three generations, no matter how successful you are in one generation, you don’t seem to be able to translate that into success in the second generation, no matter how much money you have in the bank, no matter how many smart PhDs you have working for you,” Jackson said. “Look at how Google [GOOG 578.59   7.61 (+1.33%)  ] has struggled moving into social, and I think Facebook is going to have the same kind of challenges moving into mobile.”

Last month Facebook acknowledged its mobile challenge in a regulatory filing. The company stated that the growing number of mobile users using Facebook is hard to monetize and “may negatively affect our revenue and financial results.”

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—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly

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