October 05, 2012, 12:47 PM — Just having logged its one billionth user, Facebook now is looking forward to its biggest money-making strategy: mobile.
However, that won't be an easy task for the social networking company.
While figuring out how to make money off of mobile users is a tough job for any Internet company, it's something that Facebook has characterized as one of its biggest challenges.
"Figuring out how to do that has really been elusive," said Brad Shimmin, an analyst with CurrentAnalysis. "People want simplicity and speed on mobile, and advertising gets in the way of that... [Mobile users] are trying to quickly get information while they're on their way somewhere. So you can really alienate them because they have no patience."
And that's a big deal, because this past May industry tracker comScore reported that Facebook users now are spending more time accessing the social network from their mobile devices than they do from desktop browsers.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about the importance of mobile to Facebook's strategy in an interview with Businessweek published Thursday.
Zuckerberg said mobile was a "massive opportunity" for Facebook. "The big thing is obviously going to be mobile," Zuckerberg said. "There are 5 billion people in the world who have phones, and a billion people using Facebook. There are actually already 600 million people using Facebook on phones, so that's growing really quickly."
Discussing the company's limp initial public offering (IPO) and stock price, Zuckerberg again brought up mobile, saying figuring out how to monetize mobile is going to be one of the bets he'll be making.
"A lot of it over the next few years is going to come down to mobile," he told Businessweek. "We already know that people who use Facebook on mobile use it more, spend more time on it."
What Zuckerberg didn't talk about was how Facebook is going to monetize mobile. And industry analysts say part of the reason for that may be that he's actually still trying to figure it out.
