The day has finally arrived, and everyone is dissecting the S1 for details.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/facebooks-filing-the-highlights/
Facebook has 845 million monthly users, more than half log in every day.
Facebook has 100 petabytes (a million gigabytes) of user photos and video alone.
Facebook achieved Full Sentience June 24, 2010.
I didn’t realize Facebook was actually a money maker. I guess with that many members you can charge a little more for advertising?
I still question how it can possibly be worth the $75-$100 billion they are talking about in my newspaper today.
There was a bit about it on NPR today on the way home. They have a goldmine of user information cross linked with interests and friends and keywords … it’s a marketers wet dream. That’s where a lot of their value comes from. They can offer something nobody else can.
Nice. Well, I’m out. Selling my info? Goodbye.
Eh… it’s the stock market. It’s rarely about actual worth, it’s mostly about potential. As Warren already said, being able to access lots of information about users, what they’re doing, which places they’re frequenting, their personal preferences, and the people whom they’re interacting with is a huge deal - not just for targeted advertising. And in this regard, with the exception of Google, no one comes even remotely close to the stuff Facebook is being able to harvest.
So Facebooks real value is in the information it will “sell” to others willing to pay their price?
Wait, you are out now? You do realize this is what they have been doing all along, right?
I believe the well known quote goes something like this:
“if you aren’t paying for something, you aren’t the customer; you are the product being sold”
Everyone sells your info. Welcome to the Internet.
Welcome to the real world.
— Alan
overreact much? Between this and the Xbox Live thread I wonder how you can stand to wake up in today’s corporate society.
Everyone already pointed this out but that’s their business model. Has been all along.
And the way Zuckerberg (sp?) explained it on NPR is that they don’t sell your information. They allow marketers to target specific demographics based on the information that Facebook has. So, basically they have a huge database of cross linked information that users have provided. They then use that database to facilitate serving ads to specific groups of people that marketers pay for.
“I’d like to show this ad to engaged women between the ages of 20 and 25, who live on the east coast, who are also into paragliding.”
“No problem, just sign here…”
See how Google views you:
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
That link might be less effective here since I suspect a large number of you generally ad block, no script, and disallow cookies.
That link tells me that I’m a 45-54 yo male, and that’s ALL it says. Well, there is some cookie google is using to track me as well, but it just reads as a file. No preferences are listed.
(I’m 38).
No categories?
I spoke to somebody recently who did some consulting work with some of Facebook’s marketing data, and according to her, they really don’t know what they have. In that the people she worked on the Facebook side with didn’t know anything about the data, she was explaining to Facebook what was in the database, and how they planned to use it, etc.
I know, but I’m not yet done with my fight to keep my personal info personal. Lately it feels like everyone is getting their sites and databases hacked, stolen, or sold.
I know I bought into this by uploading photos to Facebook, playing XBox online, and engaging in commerce over the internet . . . but it just feels rotten sometimes, like I need to unplug. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.
In an age where everything is heading towards digital, good luck with that.
That’s an option, Guapo. Unplug. There’s no reason you can’t other than many things you now take for granted becoming a fairly large hassle.