Secure your place at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, March 23-25
Facebook’s move to plunk down $1 billion for photo-sharing network Instagram raised plenty of eyebrows, mostly because that’s a hefty price to pay for a 12-person outfit in business for some 500-odd days. Rick Webb, a former top executive at The Barbarian Group, sees in the move (and Zynga’s $200 million buy of OMGPOP, the marker of social game hit Draw Something) a hint of desperation beyond the typical Silicon Valley paranoia that a few guys in a garage will upend things. For Webb Facebook is showing its vulnerabilities in a way that would be unthinkable for a giant like Google.
They seem more able to be toppled. It seems possible to knock them off of their throne. Two companies, OMGPOP and Instagram, came out of nowhere and became viable competitors. That’s kind of amazing. It’s amazing to me that Instagram got 30 million users in no time at all. It’s crazy that Draw Something can get 50 million downloads in 50 days. It’s mind blowing that Pinterest went from nothing to 10 million users in the blink of an eye. It’s amazing how fragile it all is. Facebook may be the first viable threat to Google, but its own market dominance is by no means assured.
Read Webb’s full post on BetaBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @rickwebb.
More in Media
Media Briefing: As AI search grows, a cottage industry of GEO vendors is booming
A wave of new GEO vendors promises improving visibility in AI-generated search, though some question how effective the services really are.
‘Not a big part of the work’: Meta’s LLM bet has yet to touch its core ads business
Meta knows LLMs could transform its ads business. Getting there is another matter.
How creator talent agencies are evolving into multi-platform operators
The legacy agency model is being re-built from the ground up to better serve the maturing creator economy – here’s what that looks like.