Decoding Facebook and Google
“With great power comes great responsibility”
There is always an argument with the public whether Facebook and Google are tech companies or media companies.
What is a technology company?
A technology company is a type of business that mainly focuses on the development and manufacturing of technology products or providing technology as a service.
What is a media company?
Media company’s services include advertising, public relations, broadcasting and other forms of media management. Their basic focus is to advertise a product and how to present a positive picture of their company/partnering company to the public.
What do Facebook and Google do?
Facebook helps people to give them the power to build community and bring the world closer together. It helps us to stay connected with our friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to us.
Google is a search engine. It provides us with information in one click. Google makes sure that we get information that is accessible and useful to us.
Services Facebook and Google provide us with
“To sustain in the market, you must know everything about yourself and your competitors too”
Facebook provides up with a variety of services such as:
- Messenger — the Facebook chat feature that allows us to make calls
- Facebook.com — the worlds most famous social network platform
- Whatsapp — worlds leading instant messaging platform
- Instagram — the image-sharing social networking platform that allows us to share moments with our connections
- Workplace — an inhouse social network for companies to connect with everyone in their company
- Marketplace — an eBay on Facebook
- Audience Network — an advertising network powered by Facebook
Google also provides us with a variety of services such as:
- Gmail — an email service provider by Google
- Android — a phone operating system
- Youtube — online video watching service
- Google Adwords — online advertising service for advertisers
- Google Drive — the cloud storage service by Google
- Google Maps
- Google Translate — Language translation service by Google
- and many more…..
So what do I call the company as?
I believe that Facebook and Google provide us with unique services and they are constantly updating their portfolio. They build technology that makes our life simpler and they feel responsible for that.
They create services that are in demand, something that is needed by the audience. They aren’t in the business of creating content. They make services where we individuals create content.
Facebook and Google are the big black hole for user data. They rely heavily on algorithms to provide us with the information that we want to see.
Thus based on this I would say that Facebook and Google are more technology companies than media companies.
Facebook and Google often talk about building virality into its product or making the product easier to use or making the product run more reliably, they are often talking in terms of design directives that are implemented with computer codes. They use different software to distribute their core offerings to their users. Their main business problems are based on challenging technology problems and they make sure they solve that problem by creating the best technology and then provide it to us.
But, Facebook and Google collect their maximum revenue via advertisements!
Yes, Facebook and Google indeed collect most of their revenue because of its user-targeted advertisements. So we should call it a media company right?
But Facebook and Google can generate so much revenue based on advertisements because they created a platform where they can get our personalized information. They can target us with advertisements because they have created that technology to make those advertising services.
In the past, there were no platforms that ran targeted ads. Facebook and Google understood the need for it and they created such platforms.
They have the “worlds best technology platform” to provide us with the services/information we demand.
