In the very beginning (2004 when I was a freshman), I remember being able to buy ads myself, for something like $10 for 1,000 views. This was really, really popular. People would advertise all sorts of things like parties, furniture, etc. A really popular advertisement was for roommates to pitch in and buy 10,000 views of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY! WE LOVE YOU!" and a picture of the blocking group to the left.<p>These advertisements were great because they were SUPER TARGETED, directed towards me by someone I probably knew. I remember sitting at my desk, refreshing the page just to see which new ads popped up. It was wonderful!
Does anyone remember the icons you could buy for your friends' birthdays on Facebook? These came quite a bit later than 2004... I would guess ~2006. At first all of my friends balked at the idea of spending $1 on a gif. But it wasn't too long before I started seeing a couple of these appear on people's walls every time they had a birthday.<p>Given the sheer number of people on Facebook, I assumed this would eventually turn into a decent source of revenue for them. But then they unexpectedly got rid of it. Does anyone know why? As a company, Facebook kind of "owns" the birthday, so I've always wondered why they haven't tried to capitalize on it similarly to how the diamond industry capitalized on marriage.
The power of Facebook advertising is not on showing ads on their own pages. Very few people look at the ads on FB's pages, and many (most?) people browse FB on mobile devices, where advertising is very hard.<p>No, the power of FB (and its future, IMHO) lies in FB becoming a data provider. So when you visit a page, the advertisers query FB about this opportunity, and based on the answer, pick an ad or decide how much to bid. And FB then collects 25% of the ad's price as a fee. Given that online advertising is a $30B market, you can imagine FB will have no problems making a lot of revenue.
That looks like a standard advertising pitch deck that you'd expect to see from any large publisher in the last year or so. Quite impressive for a college student in 2004.
It's interesting to see how they saw Facebook in 2004. For them it was a college directory and their biggest milestone was reaching all the schools in US.<p>Their pitch deck looks mature. It covers all the major points; product, audience profiling, targeting, growth, future plans etc.
Looking at things like this pitch deck and Gabby Douglas' post-medal interview, I'm amazed by how mature some people become while they are still teenagers. If I was pitching Facebook today as a near-30-year-old business school graduate, my deck would be only somewhat better than this one produced by a college freshman. Had I attempted it when I was 17 it would have been a total disaster.
I don't understand why Facebook got rid of so many features that made Facebook as targeted as it was.<p>For example, I'm in university right now and I would love to have a course application that was in one of those powerpoint slides. Instead, there is some stupid textbox which makes me arbitrarily assign certain text fields that don't help me strengthen my friend network at all.<p>At this point, Facebook has become so generic to the point where it's boring. I think the same point can be drawn to why their ad system fails. It's too diluted and irrelevant.
Based on what I read in the Facebook Effect he did sell ads, and wanted to sell more but advertising wasn't a focus in 2004-6. As a marketing person myself, I have a soft spot for him and do always wonder why he is made the villain in the Facebook story. Anyone know?