• How You’re Making Facebook a Money Machine
    http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/upshot/how-youre-making-facebook-a-money-machine.html

    What you do when waiting for the bus or avoiding work goes a long way to explaining a tectonic shift in business and media.

    In such moments you are most likely checking #Facebook. More of you will be doing that than tweeting, searching on #Google, checking stock prices on Yahoo or reading articles like this. And that constant lure, a fix you can easily satisfy both on a phone and a desktop computer, explains why Facebook is pulling ahead of every other large technology company right now.

    Your addiction is making Facebook astonishingly profitable. Put a little more kindly, your emotional and intellectual interactions on the social network are creating a great place for companies to advertise.

    [...]

    Facebook is doing well because it occupies a huge sweet spot in the connected world, perhaps an even bigger one than Google owns.

    [...] Both companies get most of their revenue from advertising.

    But people apparently hang around on Facebook far longer. According to SimilarWeb, users spent just over 17 minutes on the social network on average in March, well ahead of the nine minutes for Google (these figures don’t accurately reflect how active people are on the sites, but you can still see the difference.)

    [...]

    Another advantage for Facebook is that its costs are lower than Google’s, which helps it make more money out of every dollar of revenue.

    Pundits made a big deal this week about how Facebook excelled as Apple stumbled. But there was a warning for Facebook in Apple’s results. Apple has relied heavily on one product — the iPhone — for much of its revenue, so when sales of the device slowed, there was little Apple could do to keep growing. Facebook is even more reliant on a single element: advertising revenue. If people spend markedly less time on Facebook — because an enticing new network comes along, for example — the company’s revenue growth could slow.

    There is no such threat on the horizon. Until one develops, we will be on our phones helping Mark Zuckerberg make even more money.

    #publicités #argent #profits