Rethinking Social Media

It’s interesting how restating something you essentially already know in a novel form can really reshape your understanding of that original something. That’s how I would qualify my reading of Cha’s article, which covered business models of social media. Case in point, I know that Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter all do different things, for different consumer bases, but I hadn’t really considered the fact that they have to do something different to essentially survive (hence MySpace changes its business plan after Facebook takes over the social network market [something of which newspapers could take note]).

Because they are receptacles of human data, more often than not carelessly volunteered, it is unsurprising that social network sites rely on advertising for a substantial portion of their revenue. Facebook, in fact, has just (re)launched an advertising service, Atlas, that will allow ads to track users across multiple platforms. Ultimately, this will be a test for consumers – whether they mind Facebook’s increasing infringements on privacy more than they love being able to share pictures of cats with their online friends. If the social network’s brief history is any indication, its consumer base will grow, privacy protection will shrink, and pictures of cats will win.

What I anticipate will happen to social media is sort of what happened to the search engine market – it will become an oligopolistic competition (if you can really call Bing vs. Google or Facebook vs. MySpace competition). It also seems likely that these social network giants will increasingly diversify, to secure other revenue streams. While Google builds self-driving (self-crashing?) cars, Facebook shops for apps, but it will likely experiment with expansion into some other area soon enough.