Financier says Facebook doomed to shrink

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FacebookA capital company that looks for undervalued companies with upside potential believes that Facebook is exactly the opposite.


According to a US Business News report, Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson spoke about Facebook on CNBC. He noted that at one time, Yahoo was huge, but it was also a first generation, web portal internet behemoth and was not able to segue gracefully into the second generation that moved toward social media.

Jackson noted that Yahoo is still big and generates a profit, but at the same time is a shadow of its former self, pegging its current value at about 10% of what it was at its peak in 2000.
Facebook is poised to suffer similar indignities as social media is replaced by mobile platforms, according to Jackson. Facebook is picking up mobile users, to be sure, but it is having trouble figuring out how to monetize them.

It is Jackson’s belief that in somewhere between five and eight years, we will think about Facebook the same way we think about Yahoo right now.

RBR-TVBR observation: These days, just about the time you’ve figured out to monetize one generation of technology, it is being shoved aside for another. According to this analyst, Yahoo is a skinny survivor of the first internet generation, Facebook is a leader in the second, and the third is already on the way.

Most of the traditional media that are being buffeted by what can only be called the hurricanes of change haven’t figured out an answer to the first generation, much less gotten on board for the upcoming third generation.

Emmis’s Jeff Smulyan has the right idea with his ongoing push to insert radio into the mobile world. And so do television broadcasters who are fighting tooth and nail to hang on to their full 6 kHz of spectrum with an idea toward going mobile as well.

We would further encourage broadcast companies to have their young tech-savvy executives brainstorm every now and again on what the fourth generation may look like. It’ll be here sooner than we think.