[philipithomas]

However, I am interested in seeing how their business diversifies over time - Google has both stability and revenue from expanding beyond search. Additional features such as SSO and analytics are increasing the value of Facebook beyond just friend-to-friend interactions, and I am curious about how their business plan will support long-term stability.

[jacques_chester]

Google is actually not diversified at all. Out of $38 billion of revenue earned in 2011, $36.5 billion came from advertising[1].

[1] http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html -- compare "Revenues" to "Total Advertising Revenues".

[philipithomas]

Rather than revenue diversification, I was thinking more about product diversification. With core products like GMail, search, Plus (hah), and Google Apps, if any one of those takes a catastrophic plummet in traffic, their revenue wouldn't crash completely. In their early days, if a competitor took over search, they would have no remaining products that continued to generate revenue.

[tatsuke95]

Because Google is an advertising company (so is Facebook). It shouldn't be a surprise that advertising is their main source of income. But at least you can point to a multitude of products within which Google places ads, as well as devices and software to provide places to put ads. Facebook, not so much. Yet?

[discodave]

Get back to /r/weightroom!

[jacques_chester]

DYEHN?