One Reason Facebook is Worth Billions of Dollars
(Tomorrow I'll re-continue my posts outlining my next steps in my Twitter experiment to unfollow 12,000 plus people and only re-follow legitimate accounts. Email me with questions on that.)
Some people have a hard time understanding why Facebook is so valuable.
It's not just the fact that it has 350 million active users. The more important point is that before any one of those users does something on Facebook, they need to login. That means that, unlike the great majority of websites, which analyze aggregate data and trends, Facebook has names attached to activities. They can measure what you do. Not just what nameless "visitors" do. For this reason, and for a few other good reasons, Facebook has tremendous advantages that get it closer to understanding why you do things. This is the same reason why Google hit such a home run with Gmail. People login (and stay logged in) to Gmail all day. Then, when they search, their searches can be indexed in a personal search history.
The bottom line is, this type of system makes it a lot easier to put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time to get them to buy something. That's why Marc Andreessen can say that Facebook will one day "be bigger than Apple" and he's not crazy, even though Apple's 2009 reven
ue was $32 billion.
Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.
Comments [0]