My wife, Robin, and I went to see the Social Network last week. (Good movie. Not for kids.)
It sparked my interest in learning a bit more about the company and its meteoric growth. In my searches, I learned a few things I thought I would share:
- Facebook is Big—The Facebook website launched in February 2004 and today has more than 500 million users and gets about 700 BILLION page views per month. It accounts for about 9.5 percent of all internet traffic, more than Google now.
- Facebook and Microsoft—Most of Facebook’s revenues come from advertising. Microsoft is Facebook’s exclusive partner for serving banner advertising, and as such, Facebook only serves advertisements from Microsoft’s ad inventory. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are both Harvard dropouts.
- Nice growth—Facebook is projected do more than $1.2 billion in sales this year, up from $52 million in 2006.
- PayPal and Facebook—The first person to invest in Facebook was the cofounder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, who invested $500,000 in June 2004. Theil made $55 million from the sale of PayPal, but his $500,000 investment in Facebook is worth more than $1 billion.
- Worth the wait—it took Facebook 5 1/2 years to be cash flow positive. Zuckerberg announced in September 2009 that, for the first time, Facebook was cash flow positive, meaning Facebook had made more money that it spent.
- A Picture is Worth…—Facebook users add 100 million new photos every day.
- Facebook is big in Muslim countries—Indonesia, which has the world’s largest muslim population, is the second largest country of Facebook users with 28 million users. Turkey is fourth with 23 million users.
- Data Centers—Facebook operates at least nine data centers on both coasts of the United States, and is in the process of building its first company-built data center in Oregon. So far in 2010, Facebook is running at least 60,000 servers in its data centers, up from 30,000 in 2009 and 10,000 back in April 2008.
- Head Count—Facebook has historically maintained a ratio of 1 engineer for every 1 million users, although recent efficiencies have boosted that ratio to 1 engineer for every 1.2 million users. That means they only have about 420 engineers.
- Games—Farmville boasts more than 120 million players on Facebook. Zynga—the maker of Farmville, Mafia Wars, and other Facebook games—should post annual revenue of more than $450 million in 2010. Employee headcount at Zynga has almost quadrupled in the past year, to 775. Including Zynga, there are more than 1 million developers in total building applications for Facebook.
- Built on Open Source—Facebook was developed from the ground up using open source software. The site is written primarily in the PHP programming language and uses a MySQL database infrastructure. To accelerate the site, the Facebook Engineering team developed a program called HipHop to transform PHP source code into C++ and gain performance benefits.
- Word of the Year—In 2008, Collins English Dictionary declared “Facebook” as their new Word of the Year. The New Oxford Dictionary announced that the 2009 Word of the Year was “unfriend,” as in “to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site” such as Facebook.
- Who is Looking at Your Kid’s Facebook Page?—A recent survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social networking sites such as Facebook to evaluate applicants. Thirty-eight percent of admissions officers said that what they saw negatively affected the applicant.
All this from a company that’s younger than my fourth grader.
Mike
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