Facebook has “finally gotten religion about the need to really focus on revenue and profit,” says Techonomy Founder David Kirkpatrick in a recent interview on Bloomberg TV. Facebook has always focused more on its product and user satisfaction than monetization, but Kirkpatrick thinks it’s taken the company too long to recognize that “everything is going mobile.” Still, he believes mobile ads will be an effective revenue stream for the company. “Everybody’s in the first inning of figuring out mobile advertising,” he says. “This is a gold mine, but the problem is you’ve got to convince consumers that it’s OK to get more data about them, because if you do, you can give them information that they perceive as useful.”
Facebook, like other media companies, is still in the process of trying to define what an ad is in the new techonomy. Is it a useful piece of information that is targeted to you that you want to see, as Mark Zuckerberg believes? What’s clear, says Kirkpatrick, is that the Facebook CEO “has to become as focused on figuring out how to make money from what his users do as he puts into keeping his users happy.”