On the web, there’s plenty of room to throw a scattershot of ads at people and hope one resonates. On mobile where there’s reduced real-estate, you have to make every pixel count by targeting ads with surgical precision. That’s how Facebook succeeded in Q4 2012, and why the social network is actually well equipped to weather the shift to mobile. There’s no room for the shotgun approach on the… → Read More
If you’ve ever gotten a fake friend request, you know Facebook has spammers. But it’s winning the fight against them. Facebook’s estimate of the total percentage of monthly users that are “undesirable” or spammer accounts dropped to 0.9 percent from 1.5 percent in June 2012. That means there’s only around 9.5 million of these trouble-makers on the site, down 37 percent from 15.1 million in… → Read More
Facebook risked driving users away by showing more ads in the news feed last year, but to Mark Zuckerberg’s surprise, a big increase in their presence during 2012 only reduced Likes and comments by 2%. Users are staying loyal, which during the 2012 Q4 earnings call Zuckerberg called a sign of the value Facebook provides. → Read More
Facebook’s user base is growing much faster outside of the U.S. than it is in its home market, but it has a little problem: those users are continuing to generate far less revenue than U.S. consumers do for the company. Facebook noted in its Q4 earnings today that average revneues per user (ARPU) for the U.S. in the quarter was $4.08, compared to $1.71 in Europe, $0.69 in Asia and only $0.56 in… → Read More
About one-fifth of iOS’ top grossing developers are testing out Facebook app install ads, showing some early traction for the new product. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s COO, mentioned this on today’s fourth quarter earnings call. Launched last fall, Facebook launched new kind of ad unit that doesn’t involve a friends’ like or recommendation. These ads send users to… → Read More
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg highlighted the growth that Facebook Offers has seen since it launched last year — she said that offers have been claimed by 42 million unique users.
Sandberg’s statement came during a larger discussion of Facebook’s ad business during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call. Last quarter, Sandberg said that 100,000 small- and medium-sized businesses have used… → Read More
As Facebook looks for new ways to make money, it disclosed during its Q4 2012 earnings call today that its Gifts product and promoted user posts functionality accounted for less than $5 million of Facebook’s overall revenue. In fact, these earnings were labeled as revenue “outside of games.” Payments revenue was flat, overall, in the quarter. While this isn’t the worst… → Read More
On Facebook’s earnings call today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a strong statement about the company’s further investment in product development, especially those products that are making money for the company. → Read More
Facebook has been making some efforts to grow new business areas beyond advertising in areas like Gifts and Facebook Credits in apps, but so far the company has failed to convert that into meaningful growth. The company today reported Q4 revenues of $256 million for payments — which includes services like Facebook Credits and its new Gifts service. While this looks like a 45% increase on Q3, it… → Read More
As part of today’s fourth-quarter earnings report, Facebook announced that mobile ad revenue has grown to 23 percent of the company’s total $1.33 billion in ad revenue (so about $305 million). That’s up from 14 percent last quarter.
One of the biggest sources of investor concern around Facebook has been whether its bottom line will take a blow as its usage becomes increasingly mobile, and… → Read More
Today is Q4 earnings day for Facebook, and we’ve learned some really interesting things about the growth of the social network. Surprisingly to some, mobile DAUs have exceeded those on the web, for the first time in the company’s history. We knew that Facebook was focused on growing its network leveraging mobile devices and platforms, but it’s impressive to see this usage… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
