Looking at things like this pitch deck and Gabby Douglas' post-medal interview, I'm amazed by how mature some people become while they are still teenagers. If I was pitching Facebook today as a near-30-year-old business school graduate, my deck would be only somewhat better than this one produced by a college freshman. Had I attempted it when I was 17 it would have been a total disaster.
How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
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Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#32Hard to believe he used Times font. Probably font substitution. Also does anyone know who is the guy posterized in their original logo?
Al Pacino.
A common misconception. It was Peter Wolf, lead singer of the J. Geils Band.
http://www.quora.com/Who-was-the-Facebook-Guy-in-the-origina...
Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#33In 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…
I've bought some FB ads, and it is annoying that I can't target friends. Isn't that a big mistake?!? Most businesses are small, so just targeting your friends is simpler than getting your friends to "Like" your business, and then targeting your likes. I didn't know the feature used to exist, it would be nice to get it back!
Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#342004: 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
Crazy that Facebook has an order of magnitude more Page Views as anyone else.
Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#35In 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…
I've bought some FB ads, and it is annoying that I can't target friends. Isn't that a big mistake?!? Most businesses are small, so just targeting your friends is simpler than getting your friends to "Like" your business, and then targeting your likes. I didn't know the feature used to exist, it would be nice to get it back!
This used to annoy me (especially when people created events in place of ads) but it's mostly solved now with the ability to promote your posts. That's going to work way better than an ad that your friends are used to ignoring.
Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#36Based on what I read in the Facebook Effect he did sell ads, and wanted to sell more but advertising wasn't a focus in 2004-6. As a marketing person myself, I have a soft spot for him and do always wonder why he is made the villain in the Facebook story. Anyone know?
Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#372004: 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
The last 90mm pageviews of that Trillion are by a very different demographic than the 70,000 U.S. higher education students - Thus adjust the CPM accordingly ($0.05).
And it is only going to get worse.
Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=405727117130 "Closing the Gift Shop may disappoint many of the people who have given millions of gifts, but we made the decision after careful thought about where we need to focus our product development efforts." "We'll be able to focus more on improving and enhancing products and features that people use every day, such as Photos, News Feed, Inbox, games, comments, the "Like"…
That blog post strikes me as a little fishy. I'm not privy to the internals of FB's engineering structure circa 2007, but I doubt a few engineers working on gifts (which even then likely brought in $millions/year) seriously detracted from development elsewhere. Given the date, I think it's more likely that gifts were removed to help support the growing FB Platform rather than competing with its apps. (In 2007 people…
Annoyingly, quite a few of the removed features have not since been satisfactorily replicated by apps; or else they were once, but those apps have since been removed. I'm not even sure what the point of Facebook apps is anymore, since the useful ones seem to all be gone. (OK, I guess interfacing with websites is useful. The useful Facebook-internal ones all seem to be gone.)
Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ).
And the Firefox icon too. * http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/the-icon-handbook
Actually, John Hicks did the Firefox icon: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/branding-firefox
Re: How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004
#40He didn't manage to get a single advertiser right?
I don't think that's plausible, he would have to had at least a few small ones. And if I recall my memory of reading Facebook Effect and Accidental Billionaires, both books say that he was able to get something, though nothing big. But more importantly, does that matter? There are tons of great projects here on HN that are never able to get any customers. Does that make their work any less impressive? Let's judge the…
My question was more ... well, just a question. I was hoping somebody will either confirm that or deny.