How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004 • Hacker News Board

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#11

Post by dlokshin » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:37 PM UTC

In the very beginning (2004 when I was a freshman), I remember being able to buy ads myself, for something like $10 for 1,000 views. This was really, really popular. People would advertise all sorts of things like parties, furniture, etc. A really popular advertisement was for roommates to pitch in and buy 10,000 views of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY! WE LOVE YOU!" and a picture of the blocking group to the left.

These advertisements were great because they were SUPER TARGETED, directed towards me by someone I probably knew. I remember sitting at my desk, refreshing the page just to see which new ads popped up. It was wonderful!

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#12

Post by chintan » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:46 PM UTC

2004: 90mm pageviews @ $0.5 CPM ~ $50K per mnth in revenue.

2012: 1 Trillion pageviews @ $0.5 CPM ~ $500mm per mnth in revenue

* http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/index.html

* * Assuming full inventory

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#13

Post by throwaway54-762 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:01 PM UTC

conradfr wrote: post #6

cantbecool wrote: post #5

"... explaining that marketer’s could target by sexual orientation or even by dorm." Targeting by your dorm would seem a bit creepy.

Marketing yourself toward some girls dorm across the campus seems great :)

No, it sounds creepy.

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#14

Post by csallen » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

Does anyone remember the icons you could buy for your friends' birthdays on Facebook? These came quite a bit later than 2004... I would guess ~2006. At first all of my friends balked at the idea of spending $1 on a gif. But it wasn't too long before I started seeing a couple of these appear on people's walls every time they had a birthday.

Given the sheer number of people on Facebook, I assumed this would eventually turn into a decent source of revenue for them. But then they unexpectedly got rid of it. Does anyone know why? As a company, Facebook kind of "owns" the birthday, so I've always wondered why they haven't tried to capitalize on it similarly to how the diamond industry capitalized on marriage.

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#15

Post by remi » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:17 PM UTC

csallen wrote: post #14

Does anyone remember the icons you could buy for your friends' birthdays on Facebook? These came quite a bit later than 2004... I would guess ~2006. At first all of my friends balked at the idea of spending $1 on a gif. But it wasn't too long before I started seeing a couple of these appear on people's walls every time they had a birthday. Given the sheer number of people on Facebook, I assumed this would eventually…

Trivia: these icons were designed by Susan Kare (http://www.kare.com/portfolio/01_facebook1.html) who also designed some of the most famous Macintosh icons (http://www.kare.com/portfolio/03_apple_macicons.html).

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#16

Post by ATYT » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:28 PM UTC

throwaway54-762 wrote: post #13

conradfr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing yourself toward some girls dorm across the campus seems great :)

No, it sounds creepy.

Depends on just how cocky/good-looking the "creep" is.

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#17

Post by ajays » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:43 PM UTC

The power of Facebook advertising is not on showing ads on their own pages. Very few people look at the ads on FB's pages, and many (most?) people browse FB on mobile devices, where advertising is very hard.

No, the power of FB (and its future, IMHO) lies in FB becoming a data provider. So when you visit a page, the advertisers query FB about this opportunity, and based on the answer, pick an ad or decide how much to bid. And FB then collects 25% of the ad's price as a fee. Given that online advertising is a $30B market, you can imagine FB will have no problems making a lot of revenue.

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#18

Post by demione » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:45 PM UTC

dlokshin wrote: post #11

In the very beginning (2004 when I was a freshman), I remember being able to buy ads myself, for something like $10 for 1,000 views. This was really, really popular. People would advertise all sorts of things like parties, furniture, etc. A really popular advertisement was for roommates to pitch in and buy 10,000 views of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY! WE LOVE YOU!" and a picture of the blocking group to the left. These adv…

What a novel concept: users actually wanting to create and see ads because they are so incredibly targeted and relevant. I wonder at what point facebook lost their grasp around such a tightly coupled ecosystem.

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#19

Post by MrDOS » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:53 PM UTC

dlokshin wrote: post #11

In the very beginning (2004 when I was a freshman), I remember being able to buy ads myself, for something like $10 for 1,000 views. This was really, really popular. People would advertise all sorts of things like parties, furniture, etc. A really popular advertisement was for roommates to pitch in and buy 10,000 views of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY! WE LOVE YOU!" and a picture of the blocking group to the left. These adv…

Interestingly, I did this for an event hosted by a student organization at my small university (~3,000 full-time students) last spring. According to the campaign statistics, CA$10.54 bought an astonishing 101,937 impressions. This is somewhat less impressive when you consider that we were paying by clickthrough to the event page, not by impressions, and only got 43 clicks, but due to the size of the university, I think almost every page view that whole weekend had an instance of our ad.

Edit: I feel I should clarify that last remark for those not immediately familiar with Facebook, or those who use ad-blockers: yes, of course there were a whole lot more than 100k page views that weekend, but our targeting was perhaps a bit too constrained (~1.1k users targeted out of a hypothetical 3-4k applicable), and on top of that, Facebook only reloads ads when you perform “serious” navigation, not just AJAX-based actions available directly from the news feed.

Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004

#20

Post by tsurantino » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 7:10 PM UTC

I don't understand why Facebook got rid of so many features that made Facebook as targeted as it was.

For example, I'm in university right now and I would love to have a course application that was in one of those powerpoint slides. Instead, there is some stupid textbox which makes me arbitrarily assign certain text fields that don't help me strengthen my friend network at all.

At this point, Facebook has become so generic to the point where it's boring. I think the same point can be drawn to why their ad system fails. It's too diluted and irrelevant.