Facebook’s Foray into Audio

Ex.: How Facebook created its own Messenger app

There’s a sort of tragic irony here. Facebook has launched so many ill-conceived products, it’s impossible to keep track of them — a mobile operating system, a phone, a Snapchat clone, another Snapchat clone, a mobile groups product, an email service, a cryptocurrency (tbd) — you get the idea.

The way I look at a social network is that there is a two-sided market. You can do distribution, you can do monetization. With YouTube or Spotify, it is both acquiring an audience and it is monetizing those users. In Web2 those two things are bundled. I think that there is a really interesting opportunity right now to unbundle those two things.