You may have heard recently that Facebook is now bigger than Google. Nobody would have predicted this just a few years ago. Nobody would have predicted in 1998 that Google would wipe out nearly every single one of the 30 existing (and very popular) search engines that we used a little more than a decade ago.

Let’s look at some stats from around the web over the last 6 months.

• Google makes 14X more revenue per impression as Facebook (Oct 2010 stats)
• Facebook has 7% of all Internet traffic (same stats)
• 99% of Google’s profits come from text ads
• Facebook now has more pageviews than Google
• People spend more time on Facebook than Google
• Facebook is earning DOUBLE the revenues Google reported when it went public

In 2008 Facebook had revenue of $275 million.
In 2009 Facebook had revenue of $635 million.
2010 Facebook revenue is said to be $2 billion.

My key takeaway from the Oct 2010 Techcrunch article How Facebook Can Become Bigger in Five Years Than Google is Today was that:

Google gets it’s revenue from advertising.
Facebook gets it’s revenue from advetising AND commerce.

Oh – and wait…”brand advertising” is a $600 billion market. And Facebook is a much better place to do that type of advertising, where people are “socially”.

What really made me think of all this (again) was today when I read that you can now rent movies on Facebook. This is what I predict to be the beginning of big things to come. Let’s think about a Google a minute. There was a time when they said they wouldn’t be getting into operating sytems. Or cell phones. Or social media. Or a lot of the things they do now. And yet, they’re doing them all. Android phones are dominating the market, and Google’s web browser gains market share every day.

The point is, when I wrote on my blog last night the post “Is Google Asking YOU to block bad results I indicated that people once used Google because they were better than EVERYTHING else online. But now they are so big, that they can’t even control their own search results (and their asking the users to help police them). The comes a point when a company’s so big that they aren’t nimble anymore – and someone with new ideas and better functionality can knock them down in just a year or two. Like Firefox did the Netscape and IE. And how I predict Facebook will crush Google in just a few years.

Today you’re watching movies on Facebook, but I predict within 1-2 years they will launch a search product. And possibly enhance their ad platform to be like Adwords / Adsense. If that happens – it’s on! Facebook is poised like the Karate Kid and his crane kick – to knock Google right in the head. Only time will tell if they will be successful or not – but they’re in a pretty good position.