Facebook Will Disappear By 2020


Bangalore: Well, everybody hoped Facebook’s stock slide will stop today or tomorrow. But things are getting worse day by day and some hedge fund managers’ even start predicting after analyzing the situation that the world’s largest social network is going to disappear by 2020.

Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital told on CNBC’s show Squawk on the Street: “In five to eight years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared. Yahoo is still making money, it's still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it, but it is 10 percent of the value that it was at the height of 2000. For all intents and purposes, it's disappeared."

And the big reason Jackson list for Facebook’s fallout will be the failure in monetizing mobile platform, the same reason that investors accused and sued Facebook for hiding from them. The lawsuit which filed two weeks after IPO stated: “the true facts at the time of the IPO were that Facebook was experiencing a severe and pronounced reduction in revenue growth due to an increase of users of its Facebook app or website through mobile devices.

Jackson includes Facebook in second generation companies those capitalized on an emerging social web. The first generation companies including Google and Yahoo had trouble moving to the second “social” generation. In the same way Facebook will experience trouble moving towards the third generation companies whose sole goal is leveraging and monetizing mobile users.

"Facebook can buy a bunch of mobile companies, but they are still a big, fat website and that's different from a mobile app," says Jackson.

 “When you look over these three generations, no matter how successful you are in one generation, you don’t seem to be able to translate that into success in the second generation, no matter how much money you have in the bank, no matter how many smart PhDs you have working for you,” Jackson says.

Facebook shares, which went on sale for $38 on its IPO day closed at $26.90 on Monday.