I wrote a piece a few years back foretelling the government’s breakup of Google. I predicted a Google trivestiture giving birth to a pure analytics company – to which marketers and ad agencies would pay lots of money. Well, the breakup hasn’t happened yet but Facebook may have just stepped into the analytics breach. Facebook is launching a new advertising platform, using all the data it collects about us, to sell ad space. And not all the ad space will be on Facebook. Many ads will appear on mobile sites, apps and other things digital.
This is going to be big. I repeat, from a revenue standpoint this is going to be big.
I’m afraid Facebook will have first mover market position on Google here and because it is a social network not a search company the government will allow it. Google, I suspect, is going to want to tap into this new analytics revenue stream and siphon off a big chuck — and that may be where trivestiture kicks in. That said, by allowing Facebook first mover status it may prolong the period before trivestiture. Smart move.
Who else wants a piece of this analytics pie? Amazon. And Apple with its bold new ApplePay program.
Fasten your seatbelts errybodies, this is going to be fodder for some serious red state/blue state discussion over the next 10 year. Peace.
