jueves, 22 de marzo de 2012

Facebook is the world’s largest social network

with more than 800 million active users around the world, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population.
Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room at Harvard, Facebook grew from being a quirky site for college students into a popular platform that is used to sell cars and movies, win over voters in presidential elections and organize protest movements. It offers advertisers a global platform, with the exception of China, where Facebook does not operate.
Facebook took its first step toward becoming a publicly traded company on Feb. 1, 2012, when it filed to sell shares on the stock market. The service is on track to be the largest Internet initial public offering ever — trumping Google’s in 2004 or Netscape’s nearly a decade before that. In its filing, Facebook said it was seeking to raise $5 billion. The company will seek to have the ticker “FB” for its shares, but did not list an exchange.
Many close to the company say that Facebook is aiming for a far greater offering that would value it near $100 billion. At that lofty valuation, Facebook would be much bigger than many longer-established American companies, including Abbott Labs, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, Goldman Sachs and Ford Motor.
Trading of the stock is expected to begin by late May 2012.
The filing sheds some light on how its meteoric run has turned the upstart into a formidable money-maker. The company, which makes the bulk of its money from advertising and the sale of virtual goods, recorded revenue of $3.7 billion in 2011, a 88 percent increase from the prior year. During that period, Facebook posted a profit of $1 billion. It is still a fraction of the size of rival Google, which recorded revenue of $37.9 billion in 2011, but many analysts believe Facebook’s fortunes will rapidly multiply as advertisers direct more and more capital to the Web’s social hive.
Facebook, unlike any other site, has come to define the social era of the Web. More than a portal, its value lies in its dynamic network of social connections and the massive amount of information shared by its users. Facebook, in many ways, is a data processor, archiving and analyzing every shred of information, from our interests, to our locations, to every article and link that we “like.” The collection of data is a potential goldmine for advertisers, keen to better understand and target consumers.
The social network has become something like an economy onto itself, fostering businesses like the music service Spotify. Game-maker Zynga, which went public late in 2011, generates more than 90 percent of its sales from Facebook.

3 comentarios: