According to Rich Greenfield, media and technology analyst at BTIG, Facebooks is starting to show huge monetization potential for apps that are not the news feed. “The reality is that as you look out more broadly over the next few years Facebook has got a lot of different initiatives that are at the very early stages of monetization,” Greenfield said. “They are just scratching the surface of Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook Watch, and IGTV, which is the Instagram video platform.”
Rich Greenfield, media and technology analyst at BTIG recently talked on Bloomberg about newer monetization opportunities on Facebook that may eventually even surpass the core news feed app:
Facebook is Dominating Mobile Time Spent
I think it’s less about this war between Apple and Facebook or YouTube versus Facebook, the reality is Facebook is one of the dominant companies in terms of mobile time spent. Despite all this fear that people are abandoning Facebook or not using its application, the reality is that there is a billion and a half people using Facebook every single day. Not all the other applications, but Facebook itself.
800 Million People Using Facebook Marketplace
There are 800 million people using Facebook Marketplace. I have never used the Marketplace tab and I don’t know anyone who has used the Marketplace tab, but they’re saying there are 800 million people using that Marketplace tab to transact. They actually highlighted cars as becoming a place of real transfer where people buying and selling cars.
There are just so many things that Facebook is doing that are not always obvious to someone in the US. There are places in the world like Indonesia where Facebook Marketplace is the default way that goods are bought and sold. There are really some big differences globally such as the use of Messenger versus iMessage overseas and not all of that is apparent to a US investor.
Huge Monetization Potential for Non-News Feed Apps
The reality is that as you look out more broadly over the next few years Facebook has got a lot of different initiatives that are at the very early stages of monetization. They are just scratching the surface of Messenger, WhatsApp, Facebook Watch, and IGTV, which is the Instagram video platform. These are at the very early stages. What you do see is tremendous engagement across the family of Facebook apps and that creates a big long-term opportunity.
That’s what the Street is excited about, that they are just beginning to give hint of monetization of these things beyond the core news feed.