In a recent GoMo News article, Hans Cett alluded to comments made by John Strand of Danish research firm Strand Consult, about the possibility of Facebook (News - Alert) developing a Skype-like VoIP app. If Facebook was to develop such an app, the potential for disrupting the VoIP market would be huge, both from Microsoft’s (News - Alert) and the telecom industry’s perspectives.
It’s hard to disagree with Strand’s take on the matter. Facebook users visit and post to the site out of a desire to connect with an audience made up of friends, family, colleagues and other people they know. The site already has its own form of email and chat, so it’s only natural that some users would connect through VoIP. Facebook’s recent acquisition of WhatsApp indicates a potentially significant move is forthcoming.
With a user base of about 1.2 billion users, Facebook has a very big potential VoIP market, especially when you are providing other services to them already. Not all Facebook users would jump on the bandwagon if the social media site entered the VoIP market, but a sizeable chunk of that number would represent hundreds of millions of users and take market share from Microsoft and telecoms like Verizon and AT&T (News - Alert).
It would also give Facebook another way to monetize its offerings after it struggled with advertising. When GM announced in 2012 that it was pulling its advertising from Facebook for being ineffective, it put a damper on the social media site’s image at the time of its IPO.
Google (News - Alert) was able to make its riches by context-appropriate advertising related to search results. People looking for a particular business would see ads for those types of businesses in the results.
Facebook could not duplicate that model, because its users were there to post about themselves or things they found interesting and connect with other users. They weren’t looking for something to buy. A VoIP service would be a natural extension of what Facebook users use the site for currently.
If anything stands in the way of Facebook being successful, it would likely be privacy issues. If the company is free to use pictures and content that you post for marketing purposes, what would it do with voice calls or at least the information from those calls? This could be a challenge for Facebook to overcome, but if it does, CEOs from the rest of the VoIP market will not get much sleep.
Edited by Alisen Downey