Facebook’s Atlas takes on Google This week’s Facebook earnings call stunned the investors when management showed them an increase in the planned spending in 2015, which was more than double of what the investors were expecting. This might be because of a decision that the management made around a year back to expand from having just the basic blue application, to having a collection of applications, many of which would be performing single operations. In addition, a unifying thread has been introduced that connects the few core applications into a multitude of applications. This thread is called the Atlas. This new technology platform functions horizontally on the Facebook’s applications. It connects Newsfeed and Facebook Mobile, in addition to also connecting the acquired applications such as Whatsapp, Instagram and the Facebook Messenger. The Facebook Atlas basically takes into consideration the demographics (such as age, gender, race, nationality, etc) of the Facebook users to serve them with relevant advertisements. In order to make this a success, Facebook will need to spend around ten to twelve billion USD in the year 2015 for operating expenses. A great chunk of this expense is going to be for the research and development within Facebook. For this purpose, Facebook has been hiring engineers to design functions, algorithms and user interfaces. Atlas Analytics will also monitor purchases after the ad is viewed and hence, it can track down the number of sales that have resulted after a certain number of views of the advertisement. This is also going to include any offline/in-store advertisements. Facebook has estimated total earnings of 3 billion USD this year and next year. Facebook is going to invest billions into this system called Atlas. The new advertising server will track online users and will be able to follow their sales offline as well. This new addition to the social media website will not only threaten Amazon, but it will also threaten Google. Facebook had bought Atlas from Microsoft last year, which has re-launched last month. Microsoft had built the application to respond to Google’s Double click acquisition. Microsoft had expected the players to pile on to the public advertising platform. However, Microsoft had wanted propriety ones and hence they later sold it to Facebook. Google has long shadowed the online advertising industry. It is high time that Facebook moved out of it. The Atlas suite combines data with Nielsen and Datalogix, which can collectively evaluate the overall performance of Facebook against other media companies and competitors.
Related Article: http://www.researchomatic.com/New-Research/Facebook-Versus-Google-for-Cost-BasedAccounting-303086.html