I am always a bit surprised that Facebook ended up as reliant on advertising revenue as they are. I feel like they missed opportunities to replace Craigslist as the de facto online classifieds and to offer a payment system like Apple Pay. Perhaps these are only obvious in hindsight.
I feel that most of their issues stem from their complete revenue reliance on advertising. It forces them to make decisions about their core product that reduces utility, but makes it superficially a more sticky user experience.
> I feel like they missed opportunities to replace Craigslist as the de facto online classifieds and to offer a payment system like Apple Pay. Perhaps these are only obvious in hindsight
I think they're trying to rectify both of these exactly. I don't know about in the US but here in the UK, Facebook Marketplace is pretty much now the de facto online classifieds site, at least for everybody I know. As for payments, they seem to be struggling more, but that is, I assume, one of the purposes of Diem (formerly Libra).
The thing is that ads made them a lot quite quickly. Anything else will need time to grow to notable revenue streams. It's similar to Google in that regard, who always had revenue streams aside (like search appliances) but only now with different cloud-related (enterprise apps etc. included) projects.
But yeah I wonder about their thoughts for embedding payment into WhatsApp. Given Facebook's size they of course get a lot of regulatory attention, but they seem to think in that direction with Libra and other projects.
The thing about ads as a user/product is that it doesn't feel like you're giving away resources at every interaction. You're just reading about grandkids and adrenochrome. It's about the lowest friction transaction there is.
I used to work at the biggest social network in the Netherlands. They tried to make a push for becoming a classifieds site and also payments before Facebook, but neither of these worked out.
I feel that most of their issues stem from their complete revenue reliance on advertising. It forces them to make decisions about their core product that reduces utility, but makes it superficially a more sticky user experience.