A new article by Adage.com asks the question that we have asked in the past, which is whether Facebook is a domain killer.
According to Adage, several big brands’ Facebook Pages are seeing more activity than their websites.
“For example, Kraft Foods’ Oreo is the number 3 brand page on Facebook, with a fan base of over 10.1 million growing at a rate of 71,000 new fans each a day.”
“Meanwhile, their branded website, NabiscoWorld.com, has seen U.S. traffic drop in the last year from 1.2 million in July, 2009, to just 321,000 in July this year.”
“New research by digital consultancy Beyond, found that almost a quarter (23%) of consumers would prefer to receive information from brands via Facebook, rather than a brand’s website (21%) or company blog (3%).”
“So is it time to turn off the web site?” asks Beyond’s MD EMEA Nick Rappolt. “I would say that for low involvement brands the answer is much more likely to be yes. However, for high involvement brands the answer is an unequivocal no. ”
Personally I have started to see large companies advertise their Facebook page instead of their domain name in television ads.
A lot of domainers commented why would you promote Facebook instead of your own blog.
They missed the point.
When you promote on Facebook your still promoting your site, your just reaching a somewhat different audience and in a different fashion.
Just ignoring something doesn’t make it go away.
Domainers are generally trendspotters well ahead of the curve.
You can’t ignore Facebook or the evolution of the net.
So that begs the question, in five years will people still be surfing the net or just use Facebook at the portal to access the net and then apps to go to sites they want to visit?
I doubt most marketers would want to put all their eggs into a basket carried by some other company. One day, Facebook will do something to annoy them.
Relying on “another parties website” always has to be risky. Take the recent Facebook outages for an example.
These brands have ZERO control when Facebook goes down, how long it’s done and limited control on what they can offer on a Facebook fan page, where they do have a lot more control if an in-house site has issues and what they can offer directly on a website they own.
Facebook can not be ignored but also can not be the sole provider.
Another thing to consider.. these companies link the crap out of their websites on these fan pages, so I’m sure that attracts a fair amount of traffic as well. So are they going to pull these links? I don’t think so.
I agree with Kevin.
What would happen if Facebook decided to also include a
diet program banner or a potato chip banner?
Sure they say they wouldn’t do that.
But, rules change when ownership changes.
10/04/10
Keeping the Net Healthy: A Conversation with Vinton Cerf, Paul Mockapetris, and Esther Dyson
Location: Quadrus Conference Center, 2400 Sandhill Rd., Menlo Park
Time: 6:15 p.m. check-in and networking reception, 7 p.m. program
Facebook will go the way of myspace. Lets remember here that myspace was out first and more popular then facebook but given the ebb and flows of people, facebook will suffer the same fate of every other niche, it will be replaced by something fresh and new over time.
I dont think it will destroy domains but domains/websites will just have to find a way to work WITH their other online entities. You just cant leave them as too separate entities.
Just the way I see it.
Cheers
What Jamie & Kevin said. A domain is still a base level address / placeholder…and a company will always want to control their message.
“These brands have ZERO control when Facebook goes down, how long it’s done and limited control on what they can offer on a Facebook fan page, where they do have a lot more control if an in-house site has issues and what they can offer directly on a website they own.”
Very good point Jamie, they’d be nuts to depend so much on Facebook or any other individual.
MHB if you started giving away 1 domain every month or rewarded people through facebook for participating in your surveys whether it was prize, name recognition, or otherwise TheDomains.com facebook page would soon outstrip the blog in terms of traffic.
When I glance at the OREO FB page I see the following.
1. Already a major brand
2. Lots of interactivity
3. Games, prizes, coupons, etc.
4. Cheaper to do all this via facebook using free apps then own site
I would also bet Kraft reallocated advertising dollars for OREO away from PPC, display and other channels to facebook hence the dramatic fluctuation in traffic. Otherwise I’m betting that the migration of eyeballs are not all organic.
All that said something has to inch away at domains otherwise the world will stop turning.
I see no link whatsoever. They are just partitioning the pie and adding a sales channel. It reinforces the domain not the other way around.
AS USUAL THEY GOT IT ASS BACKWARDS!
Now as far as a drop in the website traffic? So what?? Same pie. Just the folks going to the website convert at a ratio that was higher than last year. Did they tell us that? Of course not! Why? Because they are clueless and don’t know about that ratio to begin with.
It’s the sales stupid! The only thing that counts and there are many prongs in sales and marketing and you need to exploit them all to the fullest. Pitting one against the other is silliness. You just keep adding. The center spoke is the domain name. They all feed the domain. The lifeline of business.
Point is this is very one dimensional outlook in a multidimensional world and I find it laughable. The same mindset predicted the end of radio, the end of TV, the end of Movie Theaters and so on. Their record is miserable and consistent!
jm strong o
Well said, Rick.
Facebook is a marketing tool. It is used by the marketing departments. You are not going to see the CEOs or sales guys say “Go to our facebook page to place an order”.
Anybody remember AOL’s keywords? Remember all the ads… go to AOL.com keyword such and such.
Same thing. Facebook has it’s place but ridiculous to think one web site will have any serious impact on domain names.
Also not sure but can you have a shopping cart on your facebook page, can you show your Google adsense, affiliates or direct advertisers on your facebook page? Can you add anything besides content on your facebook page?
@Rick I agree. But the golden age of the Radio is over, the golden age of the Movie Theaters is over. Couldn’t the golden age of domains be over?
I thinks that’s also the reason many people are turning to cctlds and idns: their golden ages might still be coming.
Another thing to consider is the product profiled in the article. When was the last time you purchased Oreo’s online?
@Jose
Those “Golden Ages are over”
Really??
I think they are breaking every record out there. Radio via Sirius and XM. Movies are at all time highs. TV, 3 channels to 1000 channels and more eyeballs than ever.
Just remember, I have heard this record for close to 15 years. This broken record. They WISH domains would go away because these CLOWNS are powerless without them and they want to rewrite the book. Too late.
Also, don’t forget, natural recurring type in traffic is the enemy of advertising agencies.
They need to justify their “creativity” and ad spending ability.
I would guess that the Oreo ad agency is promoting the facebook page since they can show all the “friends” they brought in.
Easier to bring in friends than unique visitors so for Oreo’s, great use facebook but corporate, small and medium businesses will always need a domain name that they can call home.
What this story is really saying, is that the application layer of the internet is abstracting away the visibility of the domain name. Sure, domain names will continue to exist, but it is foreseeable that they will be glossed over by meta layers, like social networks, like new user-interface designs, etc.
Again, you tell a domainer that someday, people and technology will evolve beyond typing keywords into their browser location bar with “.com” appended to them (sounds archaic already, just saying it), and it doesn’t go over so well.
It is possible that within a few years, it will make little difference whether one’s domain is KILLER.COM or dlkfjgldkfjgkljdfhkljhkljdfglhjlfdkhlkdfghjgdfhghdfghjkjgkdf.museum, it’ll be the meta layers around it and on top of it that will make all the difference.
Domainers can either acknowledge that those possibilities are real and position for them, or they can dig in and continue to try and shoehorn actual developments in technology into a worldview they’ve become emotionally invested in.
DNS will still be around though, underpinning it all 🙂
Have a nice day.
I’m told almost every day that unless I get a Facebook account, I can’t really “reach my audience” or “be successful.”
Yawn.
I’ve been online since the early 80’s and consider every one of these new “social networks” to have their place in the sun…and then get eclipsed by something else.
Who here remembers logging on the first time to their college VAX account? Remember VMS mail? It was a cool way to socialize!
Let’s not forget the pile of technological rubble (and the not so rubble) that was and is proclaimed to be the best, latest, and must participate in technology: (highly abbreviated..)
1. BBS’s
2. Doorway Programs
3. Unix/VAX terminal access accounts
4. Web boards
5. Genie – Compuserve
6. Usenet
7. America Online
8. ICQ
9. Asian Avenue
10. Live Journal
11. Ryze
12. FotoLog
13. SkyBlog
14. CouchSurfing
15. Tribe.net
16. Myspace
17. Orkut
18. Dogster
19. Yahoo! 360
20. Xanga
21. Hyves
22. Ning
23. Windows Live Spaces
24. Cyworld
25. Twitter
26. Facebook
And heck! I forgot LinkedIn, Friendster, aSmallWorld, Dodgeball, Bebo, MyChurch, SixDegrees, ……….
All services are lovely, mind you. The common denominator, however, was you – your online identity. So when these services move on or move away, your anchor is your domain name.
Good post but you left out LinkedIn.com
I’ve been on linkedin.com since maybe 2000.
The only thing I’ve ever done was to accept invitations or invite someone into my network.
I have NEVER used it for anything that I can think of.
I heard someone say that LinkedIn is like Facebook for people with jobs. Funny and true.
Rob
I’m with you on linkedin.com completely different animal.
Face_Shit —-or whatever you want to call is just another totally BS website.
Nothing beats owing your own website!!!
As all of you said, it is all about marketing.
I can’t wait someone hack into the sites(twitter too) or a 12 hours crash.
@Mark Jeftovic: we’ve heard that before, remember Realnames? Its pretty tough to come up with a “meta layer” that creates simpler navigation than domains. Facebook.com/oreo is more work and harder to remember than Oreo.com.
One thing is how users behave, and another how site(s) / brands are promoted.
When the first of those meganetworks goes down (or changes drastically TOS) will be fun to see ….
The important thing is not to use only FB & Co.
I saw companies that use FB & Co. but no own domain/site.
CRAZY !
There have been so many of these “application layers” that Jeff speaks about for the last 15 years………never made much of a difference really. Why would it now?
Folks will not be encapsulated in Facebook and rely on it for everything, or even the majority of everything, they will still wander away from it, therefore domains are still, and will be important, even if they speak them into their address bar instead of typing them.
Funny, I just remembered some folks saying in the 90’s that directories would replace the need to go to sites since it is easier to compile lists of sites under one niche in a directory.
I actually had somebody tell me in 10-15 years, voice recognition will replace domain names. I told them in 10-15 years, if I am not retired on a boat in the Bahamas, a drink, and a couple of babes with me than I really screwed up:-)
after all, Facebook.com is a domain too, and well developed this one !
@Russ, I do remember realnames and I was pretty quick to skepticism. The implementation was deeply flawed and at the time it seemed pretty obvious to me that it wouldn’t fly. (The same went for other attempts at end-running the namespace like new.net).
The entire point of the facebook ecosystem is not that people remember “facebook.com/oreo” as opposed to “oreo.com”. It is that for large masses of people, being on Facebook and being “online” are the same thing. So when they’re in FB, they just type “oreo”, or they click on a “so-and-so likes Oreos” link in their newsfeed, and basically just hit stuff has it propagates virally. It’s a totally different model, but it has a lot of users immersed in it.
I’m not pointing at one particular “killer app” and saying, “this will kill domain names”. I’m saying that as things evolve, the actual contents of a domain name becomes less important. It’s the distinction I try to get across that killer.com vs. killersomething.net will matter less going forward, because other factors will become more important in whether killersomething.net succeeds or killer.com fails (just look at Live Current).
In this particular case I’m positing that applications and meta-layers on top of the domains will have more of an effect in the success or failure of a given venture than what the domain name actually is. (This is the heresy most domainers can’t stomach, but hey, I love great domains as much as the next domainer and I’m pretty proud of my stable. I just don’t confuse map with the territory.)
In general, I think the meme of X replacing Y gets overused a lot. The world isn’t really that cut-and-dry. What happens when you look at various trends, you see X supplanting the importance of Y. Something that was front and center wanes, it doesn’t go away, but it’s less paramount.
In domains we have something that actually underpins everything on the internet: the DNS. But the point is DNS doesn’t really care *what* it’s translating to, a strong keyword generic, a sexy web 2.0 brandable, or an acid-crazed keyboard mashing. It’s the translation process that is the secret sauce, more so than the label or the number on either side of the mapping.
The article does raise a valid point, albeit perhaps an unintentional one, and that is that many websites, especially corporate attempts at “brand outreach” are lame to the point that they may as well be unplugged. In other words, many websites are just unnecessary. But that doesn’t in itself validate the alternatives. I don’t want the same marketing drone who created the utterly uncompelling website companion to my breakfast cereal to be reaching out to me via linkedin. But that’s a completely different conversation.
My wife and I have a “Facebook-less marriage” and we seem to live fine without being on it. In our 30s we are the only couple we know not on Facebook. However I do own my kidsnames.com and would not sell for any amount (well maybe)
We use Facebook for the restaurants, but only with the goal to pull people to our website, to convert to a re$ervation. Facebook is replacing direct mail far more than websites.
We could not have a Facebook page and the bottom line would not change. Can’t say that about the website which got over half million uniques last year…
Facebook is a fishing net, your website is the boat.
Well, it comes down to control. Facebook does not belong to anyone but the owner, your own website is always your very own domain.
The title is a difficult and a complex question. Perhaps a more relevant question is: Will Facebook be the king of search? Lately Facebook overtook Google in terms of online users. Currently there are more online users spending more time in Facebook compared to Google. The natural tendency then would be for Facebook to create its own search engine so that users do not need to leave Facebook in order to do a search. (They did this with social games and with email). And i am guessing part of the search results would include the FB fan page and the natural URL.
For Domainers it will be easier to adapt our business model as long as users spend their time online in the web, if there is a threat to the Domain World, I would not see it in Facebook but in alternative ways to access online information, especially via apps from mobile applications that simply do not require an online business to have a domain anymore.
Who needs email anymore either since we have Facebook? 🙂
FaceBook is WEB 2.0
When you see WEB 3.0 your world may change, to 3D
In the immersive .NET there is no need for MeatSpace
.
Facebook is greatly overvalued since 99% of “liked” pages and users aren’t really visited by “likers”
I’ve posted links in FB pages with MILLIONS of friends without have more than a few extra visits to the linked site!
.
i would not put my money on/in Facebook. i just don’t see people stayig interested for too long.
what are they offering? aol at least provided dial-up access. facebook is just a website that has collected heaps of email addresses, and then personal info. (what would make any marketer perk up). there are no “products” or “services”. when he uses that language, it’s geek spin. it’s a popular website, like so many others. but he is making his site an aggressive go-between. he wants to lock down everyone’s info. how far can he go?
have you noticed… now they are trying to route *email* through their servers. you can directly replay to emails. no need to log on. they want to inject themselves into other companies’ services (ISP, email). wtf?!
this kid zuckerberg hasn’t made any near the profits of the best domainers. most of his “worth”, including the “10 million” he just donated to a school system, is in *stock*, not cash. it’s a closely held company, it’s value is speculative and could more or less disappear overnight. where is the cash?
he tried paying his lawyers in stock and they were not happy… i wonder why? stock is not cash unless you sell.
and he is not selling. he turned down a billion to purchase his site (in cash i presume). the best domainers have more revenue and profit than facebook. that’s a perhaps unappreciated fact. but none were offered a billion dollars. is zuckerberg a fool? time will tell.
Harvard Business Review sent out a stat today that just 16% of users generate 80% of the messages about products and services on Facebook and other social sites, according to Forrester Research.
I believe that soon or later FB could become a Google competitor in the SE market
Sedo’s Tim Schumacher tackled this exact issue a few weeks earlier in this article: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=134696
To sum it up:
“Building an online business on top of Facebook, Twitter, Google or iPhone Apps is like building a house on rented ground, with the landlord being in complete control. Like many renters, one day you might hear your fees have just skyrocketed in the matter of seconds. Don’t let that happen to you. Otherwise, you can all but hope that history repeats itself and that innovative newcomers will continue to challenge the position of those walled gardens. “