"Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet."
This is the mission statement of Alexa's #2 most visited website, Facebook. Their goal: to connect people, and make money while doing it. Facebook, however, has not made money until very recently. Their game plan has seemingly been to grow to a gargantuan website, and then gain enough ground and popularity that their ad space is worth thousands. The problem with Facebook: people are too "busy looking at their friends that they don't even look at the ad space". The solution, which Facebook instilled within the past year, is individualized advertisements. Facebook's interactive ad agency lead, David Blum, states that, "It's about saying, 'We are going to take this information because you've acknowledged that you have an interest in X, Y and Z.'" (1) With this new model of advertisement, Facebook is slowly but surely making money.
Facebook prides itself on being an independent company (not like a Youtube, owned by Google), which made it very hard at first to make money. Advertising is their key, but there are other revenue-producing tactics. First off, ANYONE can advertise on Facebook, whether it be Windows or your friend wanting to promote his group. Birthday gifts and virtual property are little one dollar gimmicks that, for some odd reason, people actually spend money on. "The fact that Facebook is now making money independently means not only is it less reliant on benevolent cash, but also that it can continue to slay rivals, including Twitter, which isn’t making money yet, or MySpace, which is increasingly irrelevant." (2) Facebook should be here to stay.
(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118783296519606151.html?mod=e-commerce_primary_hs#articleTabs%3Darticle
(2) http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2009/09/16/facebook-making-money-at-last/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/sep/16/facebook-money
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