Company
- Most of Facebook's revenues comes from Credits, and advertisements that are served from the website's Flyers application. Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising, and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory. According to comScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!.
- In 2010, the security team began expanding its efforts to counter threats and terrorism from users.[52] On November 6, 2007, Facebook launched Facebook Beacon, which was an ultimately failed attempt to advertise to friends of users using the knowledge of what purchases friends made.
- Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major websites. For banner advertisements, they have generally received one-fifth the number of clicks on Facebook compared to the Web as a whole.
- This means that a smaller percentage of Facebook's users click on advertisements than many other large websites. For example, while Google users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of 8% of the time (80,000 clicks for every one million searches),[54] Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).
- Sarah Smith, who was Facebook's Online Sales Operations Manager, confirmed that successful advertising campaigns can have clickthrough rates as low as 0.05% to 0.04%, and that CTR for ads tend to fall within two weeks.[56] Competing social network MySpace's CTR, in comparison, is about 0.1%, 2.5 times better than Facebook's but still low compared to many other websites.
- Explanations for Facebook's low CTR include the fact that Facebook's users are more technologically savvy and therefore use ad blocking software to hide advertisements, the users are younger and therefore are better at ignoring advertising messages, and that on MySpace, users spend more time browsing through content while on Facebook, users spend their time communicating with friends and therefore have their attention diverted away from advertisements.
- On Pages for brands and products, however, some companies have reported CTR as high as 6.49% for Wall posts.[58] Involver, a social marketing platform, announced in July 2008 that it managed to attain a CTR of 0.7% on Facebook (over 10 times the typical CTR for Facebook ad campaigns) for its first client, Serena Software, managing to convert 1.1 million views into 8000 visitors to their website.[59] A study found that for video advertisements on Facebook, over 40% of users who viewed the videos viewed the entire video, while the industry average was 25% for in-banner video ads.
- As of December 2007, Facebook had approximately 800 employees—35% of whom work virtually—and had offices in 18 countries.[61] Regarding Facebook ownership, Mark Zuckerberg owns 24% of the company, Accel Partners owns 10%, Dustin Moskovitz owns 6%, Digital Sky Technologies owns 5%, Eduardo Saverin owns 5%, Sean Parker owns 4%, Peter Thiel owns 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners own between 1 to 2% each, Microsoft owns 1.3%, Li Ka-shing owns 0.75%, the Interpublic Group owns less than 0.5%, a small group of current and former employees own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta, while Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company, and the remaining 30% or so are owned by employees and outside investors.
- Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company
Facebook's homepage features a login form on the top right for existing users and a registration form directly underneath for new visitors.
Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information and other personal information. Communicating with friends and other users can be done through private or public messages or a chat feature. Users can also create and join interest groups and "like pages" (formerly called "fan pages" until April 19, 2010), some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising.
To allay concerns about privacy, Facebook enables users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see what parts of their profile.[65] The website is free to users and generates revenue from advertising, such as banner ads.[66] By default, the viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network and "reasonable community limitations".
Profile shown on Thefacebook in
The media often compares Facebook to MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization.[68] MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook only allows plain text.[69] Facebook has a number of features with which users may interact.
They include the Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see;[70] Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification then tells a user that they have been poked);[71] Photos, where users can upload albums and photos;[72] and Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions.[73]
Depending on privacy settings, anyone who can see a user's profile can also view that user's Wall. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.
Over time, Facebook has added features to its website. On September 6, 2006, a News Feed was announced, which appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays of the user's friends.[74] This has enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract attention to their profile or cause.[75]
Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users; some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information, while others were concerned it made it too easy for other people to track down individual activities (such as changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users).[76]
In response to this dissatisfaction, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent friends from seeing updates about certain types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends.[77] On February 23, 2010, Facebook was granted US patent 7669123 on certain aspects of their News Feed.
The patent covers News Feeds where links are provided so that one user can participate in the same activity of another user.[78] The patent may encourage Facebook to pursue action against websites that violate the patent, which may potentially include websites such as Twitter
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