Business Insider: Facebook failed to surpass Google, and the revenue difference between the two in 11 years is 10 times

Henry Blodget, a special contributor to the American technology blog Business Insider, recently published an article saying that although there have been rumors circulating in the past year that Facebook is "killing" Google, this is not the case because Google's search advertising model is far better than social advertising.

The following is the main content of the article:

There is no doubt that Facebook is taking over the Internet step by step. Currently, Facebook has more than 800 million users worldwide, of which more than 50% log in to Facebook every day. In terms of Internet page views, Facebook accounts for one-third of the market share in the United States, and users spend a lot of time on Facebook. On the other hand, despite the launch of Google+ social products, Google is still far behind Facebook in the social field.

In fact, the main argument for saying that Facebook is "killing" Google is that Facebook is the main way people share content on the Internet. Although this is true, it does not mean that Google is facing the dilemma of extinction. Data shows that in 2011, Google and Facebook's revenues were 40 billion and 4 billion US dollars respectively. Obviously, Google's corporate scale is still far more than 10 times that of Facebook.

Some people in the industry believe that Google is larger because Facebook is still in its early stages, and once Facebook officially starts its own profit engine, Facebook is expected to surpass Google in a short period of time. I find it difficult to agree with this view because Google has become an intermediary between consumers and merchants, while Facebook has not even found a way to become such an intermediary.

So why is search better than social networking?

Our answer is that search is the best advertising product ever created in the global market, while social networks are relatively unorganized advertising products.

In addition, search engines can attract consumers' attention at a specific moment, that is, when consumers want to buy something. If a user searches for a certain product, the user actually conveys the intention to buy the product. For merchants, this is the best opportunity to promote products to users.

However, social networking is different from search. Social networking advertising is like hanging an ad on the wall at a party and having a salesperson promote it among the crowd. Through social networking, advertisers can indeed target the desired group of people and make their ads more attractive. But in reality, these people go to the party to share news, photos and rumors, not just to shop.

So, in summary, Facebook is just hosting a giant global event where salespeople can post ads wherever they want. So no matter how big Facebook's business gets, it has nothing to do with Google.