What’s next for FacebookLondon, April 25, 2016

See me after to get this presentation

Who am I?

• Andy Pemberton, Director of Furthr• Trainer for DAN, Guardian Masterclass, others• Columnist for Campaign• Data Visualization specialist

Facebook-neutral

“I’ve just got back from holiday, what’s going on?”

April 12, San Francisco: “Our road map for the next ten years”

Press: Mark Zuckerberg’s power

Facebook’s F8 10 year plan

• Chatbots on phones• Sponsored chats• Internet.org; satellites and airplanes• VR: Oculus Rift• Facebook Live• Facebook Instant Articles• 360 camera + any camera any time

Backstory

FB is big

• Americans spend 30% of their mobile internet time on Facebook - including WhatsApp and Instagram

• Google and YouTube combined is 11%• FB made 19% of the $70 billion spent on mobile

advertising last year• Twitter made 2%• FB and Google attracts 51% of all mobile

advertising, the epicentre of growth for all media• FB has an unbeatable cache of data about people

Facebook’s valuation vs employees

• FB is valued at $300 billion • Employs around 12,000• Intel valued at $146 billion • Employs around around 80,000

• Intel just fired 12,000, 11% of entire workforce, after missing Q1 sales targets

Facebook’s strategy

• Facebook is a one stop shop for all your internet needs

• “Open source” versus “closed network”• Google Vs Facebook

FB Tactics: focus on four

• Chatbots on phones• Internet.org• Facebook Live• Instant Articles

1. Chatbots on your phone

How many apps do you regularly use?

App fatigue: the app rush is over

• 20 most successful developers grab nearly half of all revenues on Apple’s app store

• A quarter of all downloaded apps are abandoned after a single use

• Google recently discovered that while we might have an average of 25 apps on our phones, we only use four or five of those apps every day, mostly social media

Only instant messaging bucks the trend

Messaging is big

• Over 2.5 billion people have at least one messaging app installed

• 1.6 billion people are projected to become users of messaging apps, by the end of 2016

• 22% of global population

“The kids are opting out of the public square”

• “Young people are transitioning out of using what we might term broadcast social media – like Facebook and Twitter – and switching instead to using narrowcast tools – like Messenger or Snapchat”

The Conversation, February 2nd 2016http://bit.ly/1nG94Km

How do you monetize messaging?

Opening up Messenger

• Bring together 900 million regular monthly users of Messenger

• With 15 million businesses with a brand page on Facebook

• Open up messenger, so businesses can create their own bots on FB’s messaging platform

Bot economy is born!

• It started with Telegram, a messaging app from Russia, that has more than 100m users

• They launched a bot platform and a “bot store” June 2015

Weather bot: not good

Bots may not be successful

• Uber uses one click only• Facebook, Kik and Microsoft bots vs artificially

intelligent assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo

• They’re voice controlled – no typing required

2. Instant Articles

How Instant Articles works

• Publishers can post on Facebook and users can read their work, without ever leaving the site

• Instant Articles is largely, though not totally, immune from ad-blockers

• Early indications suggest content highly trafficked

Publishers get to share ad revenue their content generates

• “We look at the amount we might make from mobile and we suspect that even if we gave everything straight to Facebook, we would still be better off” Anonymous Publisher

The power of the algorithm

• As more and more publishers use Facebook’s Instant Articles a danger arises

• EdgeRank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeRank

• No transparency of how it works

“Facebook is eating the world”

• Emily Bell at the Columbia Journalism Review http://www.cjr.org/analysis/facebook_and_media.php

• “Are we handing the controls of important parts of our public and private lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and unaccountable?”

Facebook just killed your website forever

• Websites will be abandoned in favour of hyper-distribution

• Unless Facebook is regulated, people’s access to important news will whither, while the business of news will die completely

• Social media platforms – and the billionaires who run them – could be all-powerful

Could Facebook deliver the Presidency?

• In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, George Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes

• That’s less than 0.01 percent of votes cast in Florida.• The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP

primary is the absence of a college degree• Facebook knows many of our educational histories well• By only encouraging educated users to head to the polls—or

by only inspiring urban voters in some states—it could change the contest

• “There’s no such thing as a neutral News Feed.”

4. Internet.org

Connect everyone in the world

• Internet.org is in 37 countries • “One of the most successful connectivity

initiatives in the world.”• Zuckerberg has said that for every 10 people

who come online, one person is lifted out of poverty and one new job gets created.

Free Basics

• Free Basics is the program that provides free but limited access to internet

• Via partnerships with local wireless carriers • Famously, Zuckerberg wants to connect

remote regions usingdrones, satellites, and lasers

Zuckerberg says

• “It takes courage to choose hope over fear, to say that we can build something and make it better than it has ever been before”

It’s also good for Facebook

• 1.59 billion monthly active users on FB but growth is naturally slowing

• FB relying on developing countries to continue momentum

Free Basics gone wrong

• One billion people in India are NOT connected to the internet

• India ruled earlier this year to ban Free Basics for violating net neutrality

• (Net neutrality is the principle that dictates telecom operators must provide equal access to the internet.)

Criticisms of Free Basic

• It’s slow, unreliable, and restricts access to a walled garden of sites handpicked by Facebook

• 1Doc3, a medical app from Colombia gets 21% of its traffic from the program

• Accused of confining the world’s least educated people to its walled garden

• Millions of poor already believe Facebook is the whole internet

4. Facebook Live

Facebook Live: How it works

• Like Twitter’s Periscope and Snapchat’s native video sharing

• FB hopes to keep you plugged in to its news feed with live, streaming video - from the people you follow and news organizations and celebrities around the world.

Video wins

• Video is the thing every creator on the Internet must do right now

• Video is the “new black” in media, as young wealthy leave TV

• Higher CPM ad rates• Who is good at it? Old style media outlets,

whose traffic is up (e.g. Bloomberg)

So, who wins?

Winners

• Mobile advertising: the epicentre of growth for all media right now

• Video is huge; “old fashioned” media outlets do it best

• Social media: strictly pay to play• Data and algorithms: at the heart of every

business• Messaging

Losers

• Content websites• Traditional advertising (Jeb Bush’s $120m Vs

Trump’s Twitter feed)• Apps• News organizations• Regulators• Net neutrality• Employment

But only a fool would bet against Facebook

Thanks for your time

andy@furthr.co.uk