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Those Millions On Facebook? They Actually Visit, And It’s Not A Huge Deal Anyway.

kram412 — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:33:29 +0000

Traffic numbers provided by companies should always be questioned — I mean, of course each company is going to try to present the data in a way that makes them look as good as possible. Which is what New York Times finance writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has understandably done, going to town on Facebook for how it counts its active users in an article out tonight called “ Those Millions On Facebook? Some May Not Actually Visit .” His main criticism is that Facebook counts 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users, but gets to these numbers by including people who click “Like” or take another action on the web or mobile devices — but don’t visit Facebook.com during that time. Because they’re not visiting the home site, where the ads are, he suggests Facebook might not be making as much money off of them. First, I’ll look at what third party data says about actual Facebook on-site usage, then at the idea that these users not visiting the site is a problem, anyway. The article cites Nielsen , a well-regarded web measurement firm, to draw a contrast with Facebook’s own numbers. The filing said the social network had 161 million monthly active users as of December. Nielsen said 153 million unique visitors in the same period. From there, Sorkin goes on to guess that this difference might be due to the Like button and other off-site Facebook usage: “Assuming that Facebook’s United States traffic accounts for only about 19 percent of its business, that means the numbers are off by at least 40 million users from the 845 million Facebook defines as “active.” First, Nielsen is just one data source, which itself disagrees with the numbers provided by competitors. For example, direct rival comScore showed that Facebook.com actually had 162.5 million uniques in December . Nielsen and comScore use similar types of methodologies, which involve doing things like tracking a sample of internet users, and there’s no reason (that I know of) to think one is more right than the other in this case. So if Sorkin went by comScore’s numbers, he apparently would have guessed that Facebook was actually undercounting site usage. Another point on the comparison. Both of these companies track “unique visitors,” which are standards units of measurement that they separately define for all sites they track. The measure is a rough equivalents to the active visitors that Facebook tracks to Facebook.com, but we don’t know that for sure. But Sorkin does have a fair point in noting the differences between the results. There are probably some users, especially the all-important daily active users, who don’t actually visit places with Facebook ads every day. ComScore provides worldwide Facebook numbers, and it shows 794.3 million monthly uniques and 297.1 million daily uniques. That could indicate Facebook’s monthly numbers are high by a relatively small 50 million MAU but a huge 186 million difference in DAU versus daily uniques. But that point comes with its own qualification: comScore may not be able to track Facebook data equally in every country based on local factors, like lots of users getting on a single computer at an internet cafe. And there are also comScore data points in Facebook’s favor on this issue. There average Facebook user worldwide spent 11.6 minutes on the site per visit and December… and get ready for the kicker: visited 32.6 times. So if you’re an investor and you were worried that lots of users were clicking Like but not going to the site very single day, comScore seems to be saying that, well, they are visiting the site multiple times on some days even if they’re not on at every point of the calendar. This means they’d still be seeing a bunch of ads. But this is just comScore data, possibly as right or wrong as Nielsen’s. There’s a bigger point to Sorkin’s article, which he sort of addresses, which second-guesses the premise. Likes are actually quite valuable in and of themselves, because Facebook can use them to target ads, and provide the data to developers so they can build products that use Facebook to customize user experiences. Likes and other actions also generate content in the news feed that in turn makes the site more engaging. It’s hard to know exactly how valuable all that targeting and engagement activity is. But the Like buttons and other web-focused products are only part of what could be going on with Facebook’s web-wide play. It could turn on an ad network or a payments system that is available across the web at some point in the futre. These possibilities have been speculated about for many years now in tech circles, and Facebook has tried to avoid saying anything definitive. But the idea of an ad network for publishers — like, uh, AdSense, which Facebook chief operating officer helped build in her previous job at Google — seems pretty straightforward. Facebook could sell ad inventory on other sites on behalf of publishers, and give them a cut just like Google does with its Adsense publishers. And on the payments front, Facebook could expand its Credits payment system to the web as well. In fact, it already has in the form of games like FarmVille.com, Zynga’s web version of its Facebook game. That game relies on Facebook as the login credentials, so it counts as off-site, but it also monetizes via Credits, so Facebook still makes money. All in all, it’s reasonable for Sorkin to question the original numbers, and he might have a point. But third party data indicates that it might not be a meanginful one. And as far as this relates to prospective stockholders, Facebook is already monetizing traffic on the web via targeting, and could have ad plans for the future that would make this discussion moot. [Top image via NASA .]

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Those Millions On Facebook? They Actually Visit, And It’s Not A Huge Deal Anyway.

How Facebook Really Stacks Up Against Pre-IPO Google

ACMAir — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:21:54 +0000

Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was in 2004). Facebook’s $1 billion in profits is ten times larger than Google’s pre-IPO profits of $106 million. And its expected market cap of between $85 billion and $100 billion will dwarf Google’s IPO market cap of $23 billion. Facebook, no doubt, will be emphasizing these differences. But in many ways it is a false comparison. Facebook is going public after 8 years as a private company. Google went public much earlier in its development, after 5 full years. So, yes, Facebook at Year 8 is much bigger than Google was at Year 5 of its trajectory. A better way to see how the two companies stack up is to compare their revenues and profits at the same points in their histories. In 2008, Facebook’s fifth year of existence, its revenues were only $272 million, and it lost $56 million. If you chart Facebook’s revenues for the past five years and compare them to Google’s for the five-year period preceding its IPO (see below), a truer picture emerges of each company’s size at similar points in time. You need to compare Facebook as a 5-year-old to Google as a 5-year-old. Matching both companies year-for-year, its is clear that Google grew faster and was always substantially bigger no matter what year you look at. Year 8 for Google was 2006, when its revenues were $10.6 billion and its profits were $3.5 billion. As an 8-year-old, Google’s profits were almost as large as Facebook’s revenues as an 8-year-old. (Google was incorporated in September, 1998, so I am using 1999 as Year 1 for the purposes of this analysis. Facebook started in January, 2004, which I am as it’s first full year). But which company grew faster? It turns out that the 5-year compound annual growth rate for each one’s revenues during these comparable periods (2002-2006 for Google, and 2007-2011 for Facebook) was almost exactly the same: 89 percent a year (Facebook grew a smidgeon faster at 89.22 percent a year versus 88.96 percent for Google, but Google started with almost twice the revenue and thus ended up much larger five years later). Facebook’s growth is astounding, but it is important to keep it in perspective. In many ways, it is still trying to catch up to Google’s past.

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How Facebook Really Stacks Up Against Pre-IPO Google

OnSports Mobile App Battles Its Way Up A Tough League Ahead Of The Super Bowl

admin — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:15:47 +0000

Most popular mobile sports apps are trying to feed you scores and news, or show you fantasy numbers. OnSports , by HitPost, is in a smaller class of apps that’s focused on users running the discussion themselves. And now, ahead of the Super Bowl this Sunday, viral growth and featured spots on the Android Market and the iTunes App Store are helping it step up against larger competitors. The app, which lets users make their own reports and polls with professional photos, is now #2 on the Android Market free sports app section, and climbed to #13 in the iTunes version of the category since yesterday. This has translated to around 50,000 daily active users, chief executive Aaron Krane tells me, with 60% of new users returning within 24 hours. He says the app, which makes it easy to share activity to Facebook and Twitter , is generating 30,000 posts to Facebook each day, and 300 tweets per hour on Twitter. OnSports is also sending about 3000 SMS messages per day. Some of these metrics are of the vanity variety — and they’re certainly not of the scale of social mobile games — but they all indicate an engaged group of core users, in an immature category of mobile usage. Most significant sports apps, including ones from ESPN and major sports leagues, are focused on broadcasting scores and professional news to users; while they may have social features for commenting and sharing, the focus is not as heavily about user interaction. However, Bleacher Report and SB Nation — two web sites that rely on user-generated content — also have mobile apps. The influx of user web content into devices makes them more immediate competitors. OnSports is notably sticking to the thesis of being mobile first… that users will want to do to more and more of their social activity on the devices they carry around with them rather than their computers. The company has been trying to figure out exactly how to make this idea materialize over the last year or so. With the new visibility to users ahead of the biggest sporting event of the year, it could be on its way to winning in the big leagues of consumer mindshare.

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OnSports Mobile App Battles Its Way Up A Tough League Ahead Of The Super Bowl

Hitwise: Facebook.com Now Accounts For 1 In Every 5 Pageviews On The Web (In The U.S.)

Budowniczy425 — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 06:32:40 +0000

In case you happened to be the victim of a day-long coma yesterday, it was a very exciting day for Mark Zuckerberg , Silicon Valley, and that quaint little social network we’ve all come to know, love, and be terrified of. Facebook filed its S-1 on Thursday with the crystal clear intent to go public on a market near you very soon, and will be raising $5 billion ahead of its IPO at an expected valuation of between $75 and $100 billion. The company’s filing revealed some significant (or perhaps mind-melting) stats, including the fact that Facebook is seeing 845 million users every month, half of whom are daily users, and half of whom are mobile users. Zuck still owns 28 percent of the company , among other things; really that was just the beginning. In fact, there was so much excitement and noise around Facebook’s IPO yesterday that the volume of visitors looking to check out Facebook’s filing for themselves succeeded in crashing the SEC’s website . Hitwise tells us that SEC.gov apparently saw a 15 percent increase in total visits, compared to the day before and a 42 percent compared to previous Thursday. And guess who was the number two source of traffic for the site? That’s right, TechCrunch.com — coming in less than 3 percent behind the top source, Google.com. Thanks to you, readers, we gave the SEC all the traffic they could handle. And apparently more. Today, Heather Dougherty, Director of Research at Hitwise shared some further stats , which provide a great follow-up to yesterday’s IPO madness. Yes, a $75 to $100 billion valuation is enough to marinate on, but just how much traffic — and what kind is — Facebook.com generating? While this data is from January, many readers may already be familiar with a lot of this, but it’s just further evidence of how colossal Facebook’s share of the market has become — both at home and abroad. For starters, Hitwise found that Facebook.com is now seeing one out of every eleven visits in the U.S., and one out of five pageviews online in the U.S. takes place on Facebook.com. Yep, 20 percent of pageviews in the U.S. happen on the Facebooks. [Insert Myspace dig here.] Furthermore, in terms of engagement, the average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes, and breakdown of male to female in Facebook’s visitors, shows that the social network is more popular among women, as 57 percent of its traffic for the last 3 months, ending January 28th, came from the ladies. Meanwhile, the ages of Facebook.com visitors shows that the breakdown of its its visit share by age compares favorably to the online population, as you can see in the graph to the right. As Erick said yesterday, Facebook managed to report $1 billion in profits for 2011, which is a fairly exact number, considering all of the variables at play. It could be that Zuckerberg managed accounting to come out at this round, even number, a sign to investors that the company has everything completely under control. Investors love predictability. And on that note, beyond the average of 20 minutes users are spending on the site, 96 percent of of visitors to Facebook.com were returning visitors in January 2012. Hitwise’s numbers also show that, in terms of reaching affluent users, Facebook’s size allowed the site to win 499,949,430 visits from the most affluent income group, ahead of YouTube at 223,732,591 visits and Twitter at 15,166,795 visits. Facebook makes billionaires and caters to them. Further adding to its accolades, when it comes to search, “Facebook” happens be the most searched term in the U.S., with Facebook-related terms accounting for 14 percent of the top search clicks. is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks. Internationally, Facebook.com remains in the top market in every country aside from China, due to the influence of China’s Facebook and Twitter competitors, Sina Weibo, Baidu, and Renren, which are the largest generators of traffic. The social network’s largest web footprint is in Canada, where it captures 12 percent of all visits in the market. With all the excitement around Facebook yesterday, it really comes as no surprise that Facebook.com is, according to Hitwise, “the largest website in the U.S. and a top performer in numerous international markets.” The loyalty, engagement, and sheer number of monthly users proves that this company is, simply put, a freak of Internet nature. The social network has spread across the Web with its sharing functionalities, Facebook Connect, and is bringing social to just about every industry imaginable. Zuck’s proposed goal of making its social graph portable and fundamental to the fabric of the Web has certainly been realized, as it played an integral role in the rise of Zynga, social gaming, is making eCommerce social, music, and on and on. For more on the Hitwise data, check out the post here . And here’s more of TechCrunch’s coverage of Facebook IPO Day: Facebook Files For $5 Billion IPO Yes, We Actually Changed Our Logo To Zuck (A Facebook IPO Round Up) Facebook’s S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment Facebook’s S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile Facebook’s S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Zuck Owns 28 Percent Facebook IPO Crashes SEC Website

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Hitwise: Facebook.com Now Accounts For 1 In Every 5 Pageviews On The Web (In The U.S.)

IPO Be Damned, Facebook Will Still Prioritize User Experience

blogger — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:49:51 +0000

For those not from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, there’s only 1 thing you really need know about Facebook’s plan to become a publicly traded company : Your Facebook won’t be suddenly overrun with ads. Facebook bluntly warns greedy investors “Our culture emphasizes rapid innovation and prioritizes user engagement over short-term financial results”, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaims, “Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” This is a huge win for the user base, which depends on Facebook as a communication utility. Facebook even put its conservative stance on monetization in its assessment of Risk Factors for investors: “we frequently make product decisions that may reduce our short-term revenue or profitability if we believe that the decisions are consistent with our mission and benefit the aggregate user experience and will thereby improve our financial performance over the long term.” When rumors first emerged that Facebook was planning to IPO, I shuddered at the thought of enlarged ad sidebars, banner ads on mobile, and timid product development. I’m not worried anymore. Facebook seems determined not to let outside investors narrow its long-term vision. Just look at this photo Mark Zuckerberg posted of his desk yesterday. Check out our full coverage of Facebook’s filing to IPO , including its $1 billion in profit, 845 million monthly active users, and Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation of “The Hacker Way”.

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MVF Reveals Your Most Valuable Twitter Follower, Facebook Coming Soon

jos — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:38:39 +0000

Ever wonder which of your Twitter followers you should be sucking up to? Well, you can go to MVF and find out. The app is a side project created by two startup guys — Alex Taub, who leads business development at Aviary, and Michael Schonfeld, a developer at Nerve Dating. Now, the idea of measuring online influence is nothing new, but where Klout and its competitors have built fairly complex scoring and measure influence in different topics, Taub and Schonfeld offer a simple app to ask a relatively straightforward question: “Who’s my most valuable Twitter follower?” MVF (which, naturally, stands for Most Valuable Follower) already attracted some attention when it launched a couple of days ago, and since then, Taub and Schonfeld have been adding new features. Most importantly, they’ve improved their method of measuring “value”. Instead of just going purely by follower count (a number that can be inflated by following a lot of people), the measurement now combines total follower count with what MG Siegler dubbed the Golden Ratio — namely, the ratio of number of followers to the number of people you follow. There’s a big viral component to the app, since it encourages you to tweet the result at your valuable follower — in fact, you’re required to do so if you want to see your second to fifth most valuable followers. So folks who roll their eyes at public obsessing/bragging over social influence may soon have something else to complain about, especially after next week, when Taub and Schonfeld plan to unveil a version of MVF for Facebook on-stage at the NY Tech Meetup. (They’re calling it “Most Valuable Friend,” which I find a little unsettling, though whether that says more about MVF, Facebook “friends”, or me is an exercise I leave to the reader.) Oh, and my most valuable follower? Turns out it’s a certain tech blog . I was confused, at first, because I thought TechCrunch could give those guys a run for their money, but then I realized that TechCrunch doesn’t follow me. Ouch.

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MVF Reveals Your Most Valuable Twitter Follower, Facebook Coming Soon

You Know What’s Cool? $1 Billion In Profits

blogger — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:57:14 +0000

We learned a lot of things about Facebook today from its IPO filing . But there is one detail that sticks out for its improbable exactness: The $1.000 billion in profits Facebook reported for 2011. The number wasn’t $998 million. It wasn’t $1.003 billion. It was $1.000 billion right on the dot. Is this just a happy coincidence, or did Zuckerberg “manage” earnings to make a statement? Companies have many different accounting levers they can pull to slightly adjust their reported earnings. With that very precise number Zuckerberg is telling Wall Street that number is completely under his control. Investors like companies with that kind of leeway because it signals predictability. It is also nearly ten times Google’s profits of $106 million the year before its IPO. I am not sure where it ranks in terms of profits for an IPO, but I would not be surprised if it the highest of any tech company ever. And, of course, it’s a lesson in what’s really cool. It’s the ultimate comeback to Hollywood’s caricature of Facebook.

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You Know What’s Cool? $1 Billion In Profits

LeVar Burton Snags @ReadingRainbow Twitter Handle To Push New Reading App

bestcbstore — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:55:25 +0000

While we nerds may best remember LeVar Burton as a VISOR-clad Starfleet officer, he also spent much of the 80s and 90s instilling in children an appreciation for reading. In fact, Burton is still stuck to the idea of encouraging childhood literacy — he launched a new company called RRKidz this past September that’s currently working on (among other things) a “disruptive” new iPad reading app. But when the time came to set up the all-important Twitter account to provide “the latest info on the upcoming relaunch of [Reading Rainbow] as an app,” he found that someone had already laid claim to the @readingrainbow handle. What’s more, the account owner hadn’t so much as made a peep in the last three years. Being a nice guy, Burton tried reaching out to the account owner but was apparently met with silence. So what’s a geek icon like LeVar Burton to do? Why, call on his fans of course. Burton tweeted the following last night to his 1.74 million followers and the official Twitter account: Dear @ twitter I'm trying to contact the individual who's sitting on @ ReadingRainbow but he hasn't Tweeted in #3YEARS Can you help? Thanks! — LeVar Burton (@levarburton) February 01, 2012 Ultimately, over 700 users ended up retweeting Burton’s call for help, which apparently prompted the folks at Twitter to leap into action. The @readingrainbow account ended up in Burton’s control within just over two hours of his initial plea. It’s a pretty impressive turnaround time considering some folks faced with similar situations have had to wait days before Twitter managed to make things work in their favor. Then again, most people can’t claim to have spent time debugging the warp core on a Galaxy-class starship. I crack me up. Incredibly lame pop culture references aside, Burton’s story isn’t exactly a new one. Though Twitter representatives declined to offer specific numbers when it comes to instances of name squatting, they lay out a clear stance against the practice in their (aptly named) Twitter Rules . It’s a potentially huge problem for Twitter — with growth still on the uptick , more and more people look at Twitter as a crucial source for real-time news and insight into other people’s lives. Squatters, be they inadvertent or not, have the potential to mar brands and personal reputations, and Twitter will have to keep their collective guards up if they want people and companies to keep up all that sharing.

Zynga Makes Up 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue

admin2 — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:13:51 +0000

Everyone likes to talk about how dependent Zynga is on Facebook, but that relationship cuts both ways. In the social network’s S-1 filing for its $5 billion IPO , Facebook says that Zynga accounted for 12 percent of its revenue in 2011, through a combination of virtual goods payments and advertising. “If the use of Zynga games on our Platform declines, if Zynga launches games on or migrates games to competing platforms, or if we fail to maintain good relations with Zynga, we may lose Zynga as a significant Platform developer and our financial results may be adversely affected,” Facebook says. Despite the fact that they clearly need each other (or maybe because of it), Zynga and Facebook have had rocky relationships in the past . Zynga has been trying to reduce its dependence by pursuing with things like partnerships with other companies and by developing its own gaming portal . Still, it’s probably safe to assume that it will be pretty Facebook-reliant for the foreseeable future.

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Zynga Makes Up 12 Percent of Facebook’s Revenue

Facebook’s Profits: $1 Billion, On $3.7 Billion In Revenues

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:58:41 +0000

Facebook just filed its IPO registration ( SEC doc here ) and its financials are off the charts. Facebook’s IPO document provides the first peek at its financials. The company did $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, and $1 billion in profits . That’s right. Net income was $1 billion. Profits grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010. And revenues grew 88 percent. The company has an extremely healthy 27 percent net profit margin (its operating profit margin is 47 percent). That is right in line with Google’s net profit margins of 26 percent. Software margins are a beautiful thing. Click the chart below to enlarge:

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Facebook’s Profits: $1 Billion, On $3.7 Billion In Revenues