Did you invest in Facebook shares at their recent IPO? No, me neither. Despite being worth around $100 billion dollars and having 900 million users across the globe, it won’t survive the decade.

Despite the numbers, which on first reading are impressive, Facebook just isn’t that good at making money. Okay – so they had a revenue of $3.7 billion in 2011 which is quite impressive, but that only works out at under $5 per user. And remember that we are talking about revenue and not profit. 15% of Facebook’s revenue comes from one social game developer called Zynga.

When is the last time you clicked on a Facebook ad?

Okay, it does have quite a lot of money in the bank now and has nothing to worry about in the short term. New markets are opening up in Brasil and India, but its ability to generate revenue from users is lacking. Adverts are rarely clicked, they are badly targeted, the creative thinking behind the ads is pitiful. General Motors recently stopped advertising on the Facebook. That has got to hurt. Frankly, if one of the world’s leading brands says it is not going to spend any money with you, then you have got BIG problems. After countless billions of venture capital funding you would think that they would be doing a better job than that.

Perhaps GM Motors realized that the greater part of the Facebook user base doesn’t have any spending power. Children, students, they are not known for having the spare cash to splash out on Internet purchases.

Last year the number of users in the USA fell by a staggering 300,000 causing a drop in profits of $30 million.

For people of my generation, we’re busy, period! If I want to contact my friends, I email them or text them. The only thing I need Facebook for is to catch up with old acquaintances. Fun – but I could still do that outside Facebook.

If Facebook can’t hold onto its near billion user base for 5 years or more, the whole things looks unsustainable.

I do believe we have been here before.

Watch this space.

Those of you who know me will appreciate that my favorite pastimes are camping in the woods with my family or flying gliders, so the new website for Southdown Gliding Club has been a labour of love. I’m rather pleased with it and further development work will be carried out over the coming months.

Indeed – another blog! This site is for Tia Konieczna  of Soulbird Psychotherapy in Tunbridge Wells.  Quite a quick turnaround in just week for this site and Tia has already started blogging.

I seem to be releasing lots of blogs at the moment and have just done another for Greater London Carpet Cleaners. They will be producing lots of tips and hints to keep your carpets clean and so much more. They are obviously working predominantly in the Greater London area, but they are not just carpet cleaners. They can pretty much clean anything from stained decking, to drives, stone flooring and all kinds of carpets. So, if you live in the London area, give them a call!

Following on from the Panda update I mentioned in an earlier blog, Google has now released another update to it’s algorithm called Penguin. Penguin is designed to punish spammers of a particular kind, because Google doesn’t like websites to be over optimised for seach engine purposes. As to whether you get punished really depends on which camp you fall in – white, black, or gray. White stuff SEO is completely legitimate and follows the overarching aim of Google to reward sites with good content. Black hat stuff is bad – stuffing keywords, invisible text, doorway pages – the list is endless. The aim of Google is to punish sites that do this by blacklisting them from the search results. Black hat SEO is tempting, for the tricks can work temporarily. But once caught – don’t bother contacting Google to ask for your site to be re-listed  - they won’t listen.

With every algorithmic update, Google tries to reward the white hats and punish the black hats – so beware – the Penguin is on patrol!