Flat on your face

Tonight’s ponderance is, how long will Facebook last before it goes flat? Don’t get me wrong, I really do like Facebook and I’m very impressed by all the clicky widgetry and modules people have written. I just don’t see how Facebook will manage to support itself with advertising once it becomes yesterdays cool thing (aka Second Life) and people start to find the next latest greatest thing. At that point the “cool factor” isn’t going to keep the CPM rate for largely useless ads on Facebook or Facebook apps at anything worth making money off of. In addition I imagine the page churn rate created by monster sites like this will probably drive ad revenues down for sites not based on churn, where people might actually look at an ad. Google shouldn’t reconfigure for slow loading pages, but for pages that load too often. I would say the best support for Facebook in the long term is the micropayment model as there are enough suckers out there willing to buy the $1 limited edition (only 1 million of them) white baby seal to gift to a friend. Actually my guess is that micropayments are probably the revenue model that will really hit from 2010-2015 and the smart people have already made some great traction in this market such as iTunes, a few MMORPGs, Wii and Xbox360. I’ll be interested to see what props up Facebook in 2010 as I imagine it won’t be ads and I think the four choices will be:

• paid consumer mini sites (which will fail as people leave, see Second Life)
• some sort of premium subscription services (again user bailout will kill this)
• selling user data for marketing and research (now that would be a shit storm)
• micropayments (as mentioned earlier)

Of course there are already over 50+ “free gift” applications that come up under a Facebook application search so maybe that won’t be it’s saving grace.