Facebook recently announced it signed up its one billionth user. This means one out of seven world citizens are connected to the most popular social networking site. What does this mean to the publishing world or Facebook?
For Facebook, it means they need to make more money. Google nets $9.46 per unique visitor but FB only makes $1.42 per unique user annually. If FB just charged every user $5 a year to use its service, it would bring in five billion bucks.
Google and Yahoo make about $88 per person who use its search engine. FB makes $15 per user. FB is underselling what it has to offer.
Book publishing needs to partner strategically with new technology. Right now people experiment. Some authors and publishers create FB pages for authors or books. They purchase ad packages. They use FB to search for people they can connect with, in hopes of selling more books. But there’s no official service that FB offers to the publishing world to help market a book. Maybe it should begin by creating a best-seller list.
It could tabulate sales only registered by FB users. It can be updated as often as Amazon’s list. Further, it could set up a central book-buying section on the site. It would be great to see the FB community grow into one that talks about and sells books.
FB could certainly use the revenue. So can publishing.
Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person.
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