Potential diversification of the business model of Facebook!!
As of July 2017, Facebook had almost 2.3 billion people as their monthly active users which are 1/3rd of the world’s population and is extremely scary. There are very few phenomena (religions included) in the history of mankind which has been more viral than Facebook. It is true that the beautiful game of Football has more than 3.5 billion fans but then it has an existence of more than 2 centuries.
What it means is, with just over a decade-long existence, Mark Zuckerberg has been successful in creating something that has spread like wildfire (or a disease — depending on whom you ask) which has an insane viral coefficient. While Facebook was something the entire way was waiting for — an easy way to stay connected to people and also a way to increase your influence, as a business Facebook never really had a stellar arsenal. Their business (which is as huge as $ 430 billion) lacks one very critical aspect — diversification. It is almost quintessential for that big a company to keep on innovating and divulging into different markets. However, they have been lacking in aspect, big time.
They are led by some amazing minds in the tech business and the dynamic duo of Zuck and Sheryl Sandberg (I am a huge fan of her) have been spot on identifying critical acquisitions like Whatsapp and Instagram. While they have been donning the role of pseudo investment bankers and M&A specialists pretty well, it is high time for them to brainstorm with alternate sources of revenue.
This is a small attempt from my side where I have used all of my creative juices to come up with some exciting alternate revenue channels -
- Whatsapp for business:- Whatsapp is the place where all people spend the most number of hours of their day. An average adult spends about 2 hours on Whatsapp and just wonder if this could be leveraged to make businesses do everything through Whatsapp moving away from emails — like people getting the PDF’s of their booked travel/movies tickets as Whatsapp messages (Make My Trip has been trying this for air tickets involving Delhi) and just charge a minimum fee as low as $ 1 from companies for doing the same (this will give them a monthly revenue as high as 1 billion assuming half of the population Whatsapp can be tapped via Whatsapp for business).
- Peer-to-peer payments:- Instagram and Whatsapp can act as facilitators for Facebook to step into this peer-to-peer payment world. It has limitless potential if tapped right and they can be looking at becoming the global version of WeChat.
- Stick to their basics — Copy the shit out of competition (:P):- Facebook can clone YouTube and make a similar version out of it but with significant tweaks to make it much more appealing. The Chief of Product of YouTube mentions that 70 % of the user’s view time can be accounted for their AI based recommendation engine. Now ponder how Facebook can deep dive into their humongous data sets and come up with an exciting video platform which would essentially be friends and family video site. Imagine being able to filter results based on creator: family, friends, friends of friends or other. Grandparents would kill for this feature, the ability to see every video of their grandchildren and parents are interested in their kids’ hobbies and interests too, and the lives of their friends. This would mean removing a lot of negativity surrounding the hatred and fake news persisting on YouTube and coming up with a platform where people see the actual shit you create while all the huge amounts of personal information Facebook has (pun intended) can help make it more discoverable than their monotonous news feed.
- The VR game:- Being led by two of the finest visionaries in the tech industry has its own pro’s. Facebook acquired a VR startup named Oculus. While the entire space is exciting and is in the inception stages, Facebook does have the talent of some of the best and creative developers of the world and since Facebook barely innovates, I am guessing the developers are hungry to be pushed beyond their comfort zones. Facebook can use this acquisition to understand the space behind VR and direct all of its developers to understand and develop the software and OS powering the VR, With the space being very nascent and equally exciting, if the cunning Zuck can manage to turn Facebook into a forum which powers VR startups of the future, then they can do something similar as what Amazon did with the AWS. It is essential to remember that the one who invests and owns the infrastructure of the promising future tech would have the last laugh.
- FB Coin (Out of the blue):- While this is a very long shot thing but then Facebook has been receiving a lot of flak for not being able to prevent the spread of false and hatred messages across it over the years. It is high time that they come up with something to end this thing once and for all. Users who create and spread good genuine content can be rewarded with a special type of cryptocurrency. Since FB is bigger than any religion, I can only assume the value of the crypto to grow over the years. Moreover, there lie exciting ways to cash in on this as well. FB can pair up with startups which are burning a lot of cash these days — Lyft/UBER, Amazon/Flipkart etc and the FB coin can be used to redeem certain offers. All of these capital burning companies need consumers and FB has the largest single loyalty base which can turn into a consumer supplying machine.
This article originally appeared on LinkedIn. You can follow this space for exciting perspectives on technology companies, exciting business use cases they find for cutting-edge technology and how they manage to disrupt new spaces. Thanks for reading and in case we haven’t met, I am Pratyush Choudhury
