I appeared on this week’s episode of Scott Galloway’s The Prof G Show with an Office Hours question about Facebook’s antitrust challenges:
With all this antitrust pressure facing Facebook at the moment, do you think there’s any chance that – if they are forced to divest one or more of their assets – Mark Zuckerberg could choose to get rid of Facebook, the ‘Big Blue app’ itself, rather than, for example, Instagram?
Some estimates say that, by next year, Instagram could account for up to 40% of the parent company’s advertising revenue, and this has been increasing significantly every year since Instagram started really generating revenue back in 2015. And with some other beefed-up revenue-generating features like shopping also gaining traction on Instagram lately, it’s maybe not crazy to think that, in the next couple of years, Instagram could end up bringing in more “cabbage” than Facebook itself. With all the controversy around fake news and content moderation on the Facebook platform, it might be starting to seem like more trouble than it’s worth.
So, what do you think – could Mark Zuckerberg ever give up his baby for a potentially greater shot at better future revenue?
Check it out at about the 45:35 mark below to see what Scott had to say.
As a follow-up, I posed the same question to long-time Facebook observer, WIRED Editor at Large, and author of ‘Facebook: An Inside Story‘, Steven Levy, and this is what he had to say.
