In a Facebook post, Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus spoke a bit about Facebook’s plans: ![]() This puts the company squarely in competition with Apple, Google and Microsoft in the digital personal assistant space. Facebook’s transition from a company that makes no money from mobile to a company that makes 76% of ad revenue from mobile was quick and painless.We’d been hearing rumblings that Facebook was working on an “assistant” within Messenger ( along with others), but today we’ve gotten the details that pull it all together. Even though “mobile jitters” played a big role in Facebook’s IPO, those days are long gone. The company commanded 36% of mobile ad spending last year, while Google grabbed just 11% of it, according to eMarketer. This battle is worth watching closely, because Facebook is already winning the mobile advertising game. The company wants Facebook messenger, where M will live, to become your go-to app for everything. (You might instead find that Tupelo hotel room using your Kayak app, where booking is easier than in a mobile Web browser because you’ve already entered your credit card information.)įacebook’s M, with its aspirations of planning birthday parties and delivering groceries, is a shot fired in the battle for mobile intent. It’s why $66 billion-a-year Google (or, really, Alphabet) can enjoy healthy 24% profit margins while investing in self-driving cars, Internet balloons, and life-extending biotechnology.īut Google’s (GOOG) money-printing machine has come under threat with the shift to mobile, where people search for things inside discrete apps and not in Web browsers. It is straightforward, transactional and efficient. Intent doesn’t require hundreds of millions of eyeballs, or hours of attention, or “engagement,” or “brand awareness,” or any flavor of advertising fluff. If you know a customer intends to rent, say, a hotel room in Tupelo, hoteliers in that Mississippi town are willing to part with a lot of money to get in front of that customer. ![]() It’s the bottom of the so-called marketing funnel, and it’s a really valuable place to be. The rhetoric around M’s launch made it clear that Facebook’s virtual assistants are very advertiser friendly: Facebook vice president Davis Marcus told Wired quite directly that M is “capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do.” He explained further: “Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that’s an opportunity for us to over time.” But those virtual assistants aren’t attached to advertising businesses and they’re not money-makers for their parent companies. On the surface, it appears that M competes with Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. The Graph Search stumble is important, because it was Facebook’s big attempt to dethrone Google’s most profitable business, search advertisements. Eventually, the company dropped the “graph” part and retreated from its grand plans to make everything on its network searchable, noting that “search at Facebook is a long-term effort.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg even admitted as much, telling Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014 that it would be “generous” to say Graph Search worked half the time. A Wired writer declared that Graph Search “ made him a Facebook addict.” Except for most people, it didn’t work. Facebook (FB) launched it in 2013, and it was hailed as “amazing” and a Yelp-killer. Or Riff, the collaborative video sharing app, or Gifts, its ill-fated foray into commerce.īut the most relevant flop to consider when evaluating Facebook M is Graph Search. And don’t forget Paper, the news reading app which quickly fell from the top of the App Store charts. (And after that, its reboot of Slingshot.) Same goes for the much-hyped Rooms, a collaboration app. And Slingshot, Facebook’s second Snapchat knock-off. Such was the fate of Poke, Facebook’s Snapchat knock-off. M could be forgotten in a matter of weeks. ![]() It launches a lot of things that become blockbuster success stories, like its video player or its Facebook Messenger app, but it also has built a lot of duds. But when evaluating the latest shiny object to come out of 1 Hacker Way, it’s important to consider one thing: Facebook launches a lot of things that utterly flop.
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