Media Saint

Facebook Is a Money Machine

“Remember three years ago, when Microsoft paid a quarter-billion dollars for 1.6% of Facebook and the exclusive right to run banner ads across Facebook.com? Tell the truth, how many of you thought that was a killer business decision? I can’t say I did at the time. But as that deal is about to expire in 2011, Facebook’s status as a revenue juggernaut is rarely questionedany more.

In fact, I have been mulling over data from both companies, and I’m ready to declare in public my belief that Facebook will be bigger in five years than Google is right now, barring some drastic action or accident. Futhermore, Facebook will grow without needing to cut into Google’s core business of text ads, which are still 99% of Google’s profits. Even if every single Facebook user performs just as many searches with Google as ever—including Google Instant, mobile search, and YouTube—Facebook will inexorably grow as big as Google is today and maybe bigger, because Madison Avenue’s brands are less interested in targeting than they are in broadcasting to vast mother-loving buckets of demographically correct eyeballs, and Facebook has become the perfect platform for that.

What do I mean by bigger? Facebook already has more page views than Google. People already spend more time spent on Facebook than Google. I’m referring to the life blood of any business: revenues.

Facebook has figured out its business model, and wants to keep it out of the public eye as long as possible. Facebook’s alleged revenue has grown from $275 million in 2008 to $635 million in 2009 to a rumored $2

billion this year, which is much higher than the also-impressive $1.2 billion number circulating earlier this year. Let’s pause and reflect for a moment. Facebook is allegedly already earning double the revenues Google reported when it filed to go public.

Facebook Advertising does not directly compete with the text advertisements of Google’s AdWords and AdSense. Instead Facebook is siphoning from Madison Avenue TV ad spend dollars. Television advertising represented $60 billion in 2009, or roughly one out of every two dollars spent on advertising in the U.S.; the main challenge marketers have with the Internet till recently has been that there aren’t too many places where they can reach almost everybody with one single ad spend. Facebook fixes that problem. Specifically, Sheryl Sandberg went on record in August saying that some brands have increased their spending twentyfold in the past year:

Davide Grasso, Nike’s chief marketing officer, says Facebook “is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.”

In 2008 [Sheryl Sandberg] left Google for the experience of running a startup—and because she believed Facebook was the better bet to win in brand advertising, which accounts for 90 percent of the $600 billion ad market. “We are in a much bigger market than Google, and we have much, much more runway,” says Sandberg.

Facebook Ads employ demographic characteristics (Age/ Sex / Location and Interests), which corporate brand managers and television ad buyers have been accustomed to purchasing for half a century. By contrast, Google AdWords target on the intent revealed by search queries, a practice that has seemed odd and new to Madison Avenu

But it’s not just Madison Avenue. I keep thinking about putting BusinessWeek’s $600 billion ad market in context; Google seems to be having as hard a time getting into brand advertising as Microsoft had getting into search. By contrast, Facebook is making this look easy. Yahoo just paid $1 per like, and buying fans is only going to get more expensive as the lifetime value of a “fan” is better understood.

Plus, Facebook is getting stronger at developing products for advertisers, and once they set their mind on adding algorithmic search and/or an AdWords or AdSense competitor, I’m sure some of the over 100 ex-Google engineers who are now at Facebook will volunteer for the job. Could that also represent a multi-billion dollar advertising stream by siphoning some market share from Google for searches placed within Facebook? Perhaps, though I note again that they don’t even have to go there to reach $30 billion in annual revenues.

Five years from now, billions of dollars of advertising will be spent to direct consumers from one part of Facebook … to another part of Facebook, where we’ll be offered real items to buy for ourselves or others (birthday alarm, anyone?), premium services to subscribe to, virtual goods to procure and play with, and deals-of-the-moment available for immediate purchase (or we’ll miss out forever!).

Getting back to Facebook, if I add my rough numbers for Facebook’s TV ad siphoning ($10 billion) + Games ($3 billion) + Places & Pages deals ($10 billion) + Credits & PayPal ($12 billion) + Photos ($1 billion) + Inbox ($1 billion) + Some of Bret Taylor’s other ten applications (???) = over $30 billion (actually, closer to $40 billion) in annual revenues five years from now. Which is more than Google has in annual revenues today.

Is this analysis sloppy, hasty, laden with assumptions, and likely incorrect? Sure. But does it illustrate the possibilities of a very powerful Facebook five years from now? Yes. Yes it does.