Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you
Tagline
Net Worth
$528,000,000,000
Started in (City)
Cambridge
Started in (Country)
US
Incorporation Date
04th December, 2004
Bankruptcy Date
-
Founders
- Mark Zuckerberg
About
Facebook, Inc. is an American social media conglomerate corporation situated in Menlo Park, California. It was established by Mark Zuckerberg, alongside his individual flat mates and understudies at Harvard College, who were Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, initially as TheFacebook.com—today\’s Facebook, a mainstream worldwide informal communication site. Facebook is one of the world\’s most important organizations. It is viewed as one of the technology organizations along Big Five with Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google. Facebook petitioned for an intial open offering(IPO) on February 1, 2012. Facebook can be accessed from devices with Internet connectivity, such as personal computers, tablets and smartphones. After registering, users can create a profile revealing information about themselves. They can post text, photos and multimedia which is shared with any other users that have agreed to be their "friend", or, with a different privacy setting, with any reader.
Beginning
The company has a complicated early history. It began at Harvard University in 2003 as Facemash, an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students. Because the primary developer, Zuckerberg, violated university policy in acquiring resources for the service, it was shut down after two days. Despite its mayflylike existence, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004. He then created a new social network at that address with fellow students Saverin, Moskovitz, and Hughes. The social network TheFacebook.com launched in February 2004. Harvard students who signed up for the service could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their lives, such as their class schedules and clubs they belonged to. Its popularity increased, and soon students from other prestigious schools, such as Yale and Stanford universities, were allowed to join. By June 2004 more than 250,000 students from 34 schools had signed up, and that same year major corporations such as the credit-card company MasterCard started paying for exposure on the site. In September 2004 TheFacebook added the Wall to a member’s online profile. This widely used feature let a user’s friends post information on their Wall and became a key element in the social aspect of the network. By the end of 2004, TheFacebook had reached one million active users. However, the company still trailed the then-leading online social network, Myspace, which boasted five million members.
Road to Success
They got their first investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel, a San Francisco-based investor that had increased his worth on dot-com pioneers including PayPal. Till now, the entrepreneur saw that the website has much more potential and they decided to assign a small founding team as an investment that quickly turned into several billion dollars. Facebook was growing up and up by initially attracting members from Ivy League universities and then they covered all universities in the United States. The website was started accepting users with their own .edu email address and expanded eventually to allow anyone in the United States to join and then to allow everyone in the entire world to sign up. Facebook has brought a revolution in the world of social media by creating tens of billionaires, hundreds of millionaires, and an online platform where hundreds of millions of people around the whole world can quickly and easily connect with each other. In just nine years, Facebook forced everyone to write their success story with this innovative dorm room start-up that has reached over a billion people with its open communications. Facebook’s success is truly remarkable and a great example of the internet’s potential for rapid growth, success, and real change, when you consider its history as a simple tool for rating students’ attractiveness. Facebook’s controversial history at Harvard, the battles between its founders for equity, its current status as one of the most popular websites on the internet, and the fast growth of the service as a communications tool all are remarkable and played an important role in the success of Facebook. In the latest achievement of Mark Zuckerberg is that they announced to acquire WhatsApp Inc. by Facebook on February 19, 2014, for US$19 billion.
Challenges
1. New Revenue Sources
Facebook’s core newsfeed isn’t the crown jewel of its portfolio anymore, at least where its next wave of growth is concerned. Instagram and Stories, and even WhatsApp, are looking a lot more interesting these days to many growth-seeking investors.
2. Problem Content
Ever since Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has taken pains to inform people how its processes for purging fishy accounts, apps and other types of problematic content are improving. It also broke out for the first time its content moderation efforts on Instagram versus core Facebook, saying that it deleted millions of pieces of content depicting child abuse and self-harm.
3. Regulatory Headaches
Facebook’s Libra project was supposed to represent its next big innovation in financial services. Instead, it became a flash point for long-simmering ire towards the company for privacy-related infractions, political advertising, content moderation issues, and even its spotty record on civil rights.
Failures
In 2007, Facebook rolled out a tracking program called Beacon. Beacon took information encompassing about 50 million Facebook users' purchases and activities on other websites -- like Travelocity, Fandango, The Knot and Overstock.com -- and posted it to their News Feed, without always clearly asking for the user's approval. Several weeks into Beacon's existence, tens of thousands of Facebook members had signed a petition to drop the feature. After a month, Facebook created an "opt-out" from the service, effectively ending its abbreviated life. Facebook rolled out the ability to log in to other sites with your Facebook credentials in late 2008, and the tool, called OpenID, gradually began to spread across the web. This tool opened the door to Facebook's eventual dominance of the internet. The company soon made its "like" button available on other websites, opening the door to widespread tracking of individuals' web browsing history—even those who weren't Facebook users.
"That was a big thing, because Facebook extended its ability to track you across websites," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for a Digital Democracy.
Achievements
- Facebook counted 845 million active monthly users at the beginning of 2012, which equated to a whopping 39% increase over the prior year.
- n its first year as a public company, Facebook generated $1.54 of average revenue per user across its global base, equating to $5 billion of annual sales.
- Transitioning to a mobile-based service.
- Five years ago, Facebook's $1 billion of trailing net income made the company look richly valued at its IPO. Investors were being asked to pay more than 100 times earnings when shares were initially priced at $38 apiece.
Subsidies
- Onavo
- Oculus VR
- LiveRail
CEOs
- Mark Zuckerberg