'Mobile Is Going To Crush Facebook' ? Forbes ? 423 Digital, Inc.

Is the shift from desktop to mobile happening even faster than expected?

by Eric Jackson, Contributor

Yesterday, Mark Cuban wrote a really interesting post giving his post-mortem on the?Facebook IPO.

He made several points. ?I thought the most interesting was this one:

Mobile is going to crush Facebook. The logic for Facebook?s price decline is that they have a problem in mobile. They can?t offer all the games they can in a browser. They can?t offer the same ads or branding opportunities. All true.

From the Wall Street Journal :
?As more people gravitate to smartphones and tablets, they?re increasingly forgoing the desktop to the access the Web. Between 2008 and 2011, the percentage of U.S. adults who accessed the Internet from PCs daily grew to 62% from 54%. In the same period, the percentage of daily mobile Internet users rocketed to 26% from 4%, according to Forrester Research.

?People see this modality of consumption shifting from the PC to mobile,? said Matt Murphy, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. ?On top of that, mobile feels like it?s much more the kind of wide open that anybody can win kind of arena.?

All true as well.

However the same is absolutely true for every ad driven internet site.?They face limitations in what they can offer on mobile vs what they can offer through a PC brower. Look at the Google search results on mobile. No where near the number of results. Thats fewer click and CPM opportunities and ZERO display ad opportunities. Of course Google has Android, but that still isn?t generating much , if any revenue for them and it isnt currently designed to.

And then lets not forget Youtube. Everyone is supposed to be dumping TV and heading to video right ? Well how can that be if most online consumption is headed to mobile ? With so few mobile users having unlimited data plans, and that number most likely declining, then what is Youtube going to do when users start complaining and going nuts over the fact that they are having to pay for the data they use to watch Youtube mobile ads ? How many youtube ads have you seen on a mobile device lately ?

Which leads to a much broader question.?Just what percentage of PC Online usage will mobile displace???Is it feasible that people will ?cut the broadband cord? and live exclusively off of their mobile internet access ? Why not use your mobile as an in home hotspot rather than paying for 2 internet connections ??If you avoid streaming video and downloads its easy to stay within your caps. Do you know anyone that has cut their broadband access to go exclusively mobile internet ?

Bottom line, if you think mobile will displace online usage from PCs then you should immediately short Google and other ad plays and buy TV stations and networks. If you can?t buy an ad effectively on mobile and no one is using a PC to connect to the internet any more, then the only way to reach an audience is going to be via good old tv. And all that over the top video noise, forgettabout it.

I wonder what Netflix thinks about mobile vs pc online consumption ?

A couple of weeks before Facebook?s IPO, I wrote ?Here?s why Google and Facebook might completely disappear in the next 5 years? here in Forbes. ?It?s become my 3rd most popular post ever.

The key reason I cite in the post is the generational shift to mobile. ?I state that I believe there have been 3 distinct generations in the history of the Web or Internet: (1) Portals/Web 1.0, (2) Social/Web 2.0, and (3) Mobile.

We used to call these companies ?Internet? or ?Web? companies. ?With the advent of mobile and people using their phones and tablets as their primary computing devices instead of PCs, it?s probably a misnomer to keep referring to ?Web? companies. ?Roger McNamee is probably right that a better word for these kinds of companies building apps for sharing info across mobile devices are ?hypernet? companies.

I believe that, with each new generation of Web/Hypernet companies, the prior generational winners have an increasing difficult time competing, as they still try to maintain their profit stream from the business that made them successful in the prior generation.

The recent scandal around whether Facebook gave its bankers a tip that their Q2 revenues were going to be lower than previously estimated may well speak to the problem of the shift from desktop to mobile happening sooner than planned.

We will have to see.

Original article link here.

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