Its all about traffic.
The internet is all about traffic, lately in 2013 we have witnessed an interesting phenomena, established users in the digital space continue to acquire talent and web properties in the billions of dollars and in some cases, either concluding the business they have just acquired or simply as a means to add to their web properties. This is mainly for maintaining their dominant position on the web, such as in the case of Yahoo’s multiple technology acquisitions, who runs multiple sites all across its spectrum of sub domains and we are witnessing a strategy replicated by Facebook and Google too. Traffic Dominance is their eventual goal and eyeballs valuations still rinks true to this day.
Once a dominating position of traffic has been established, monetization only begins later, continued development and feature additions have to be the core focus till the time traffic growth momentum can be regularly maintained, the best options for these are user generated content, which is extremely versatile and dynamic.
Dynamic sites of yesterday years are also required to evolve beyond their regular norm otherwise they risk becoming static and obsolete themselves, such as in the case of google search, Although search results are dynamically created, there is still not much difference to doing a search today or a month from now will provide very little benefit and in itself this makes google, static, as its content results can only be added by Google and no one else, due to its proprietary ranking algorithm. In such an scenario, we have to ask ourselves? isn’t the fears of google becoming obsolete more valid than us expecting the same from Facebook.
In the recent study published “Facebook to lose 80% of its user base by 2017” by Princeton University fails to take into account the benefits of user generated content vs static pages, in which we can also consider Yahoo and google search as sitting ducks. As yahoo’s main pages also remain increasingly static. As long as Facebook can maintain its traffic momentum, it just doesn’t matter, if it loses its user base in an increasingly open shared authentication web network.
Facebook Is About to Lose 80% of Its Users, Study Says
http://business.time.com/2014/01/21/facebook-is-about-to-lose-80-of-its-users-study-says/