With Barack Obama now headed to the White House, the United States can look forward to change – like a timetable for a withdrawal from Iraq, a long-overdue environment plan, accessible health care and the end of Facebook as we know it.
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You’re excused if you just spit up your coffee all over my column after that last point. Connecting Obama’s presidency with the end of Facebook might seem like quite a jump, but it makes perfect sense. Follow along:
After the success of My.BarackObama, Obama’s campaign site, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will wake up to the inescapable conclusion that his site could be the biggest money-maker in the world and that it is nowhere near its potential.
Obama’s use of Facebook-like social networking technology – personalized pages, comments, friends, a virtually one-click fundraising tool – to raise money makes Facebook’s profit margins look pathetic by comparison.
On speech nights, Obama’s campaign revealed, money came through his Website at the rate of $500,000 per hour. Other estimations are that Obama took in an average of $270,000 an hour for the month of October.
Overall, some $650 million was raised by the president-elect. And that’s with a stated total of only 3.1 million contributors.
There are more than 100 million regular users on Facebook, yet investors estimate its worth as a relatively paltry $15 billion.
With few users, My.BarackObama demonstrated how much money can be made via social networking – and how much is not being made on Facebook.
Zuckerberg has perhaps already taken note. Earlier in October, he told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Facebook would have a new business model in place before 2011. “In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is” were his exact words.
Given the recession, Zuckerberg may have no choice. Advertisers will spend less on sites like his, forcing him to seek other revenue streams.
If Obama was able to squeeze millions out of his social networking site, look for Zuckerberg to do the same. Only instead of asking for donations, Facebook will charge a fee.
The campaign’s strange dot-coms
There’s no better place to review the Obama-McCain presidential bout than on the Internet. But strangely, not on the candidates’ Websites, where there are more questions than answers.
Versionista, an online service that tracks changes to Websites over time, shows numerous curious edits to both Obama’s and McCain’s sites.
Comparing Obama’s site today to the one he had up in June shows a constantly edited page fine-tuning the Obama message. In the last few weeks of the campaign, the Obama sitemasters flipped the term “unwanted pregnancy” to “unintended pregnancy,” and the section on incandescent light bulb reduction was mysteriously dropped.
On McCain’s site, his health care plan became a tad defensive as he edited in Obama’s name more than 20 times at the end of October. The most extreme move was when Governor Sarah Palin, McCain’s Alaskan running-mate, mystifyingly deleted her state governor page after she was chosen VP candidate.
Viewed as either late-breaking policy shifts, cover-ups or just site updates, these edits make little sense. As the Internet becomes a more important resource for candidates (see above!), inexplicable changes to candidate sites will need to be explained.
joshuae@nowtoronto.com
