Array of Awesome Reads #2 (Facebook)
Curated List of reads that are interesting, informative or inspirational. Or all of them at once.
With more than 1.7 billion monthly active users and a revenue of more than $6 billion (in only the second quarter of 2016), Facebook is not just a big company, it is one of the few with a significant influence on our 21st Century lives.
So, this week the company/the product is our topic of focus.
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Facebook’s vision for the future places a lot of focus on Artificial Intelligence, VR/AR technology and the modest goal of connecting the whole world!
“But 10 years into the journey of building Facebook, we connected about a billion people — and we realized that our real mission wasn’t to connect one-seventh of the world, it was to connect the whole world.”
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One of the biggest factors in Facebook’s staggering growth has been its success in making great use of the mobile platform. And right now, it is one of the elite few companies that dictates how the platform should work.
On an average day in June, the company said, more than 1 billion people across the world accessed Facebook using a mobile device. Mobile ads generate 84 percent of the company’s ad revenue. Mobile is how Facebook works. And increasingly, Facebook is how the mobile Internet works.
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The point about the mobile platform is also one of the reasons why Facebook grew so well while Twitter stalled. And why it has managed to become one of the front-runners in the Attention Economy.
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Speaking of attention, while links generally didn’t get much of it compared to other “in-house” content (like photos) anyhow, with the advent of Facebook video, they are getting even fewer engagements.
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While Facebook leaves it up to its algorithms to figure out what users might be interested in, it is trying other approaches as well like hiring people to basically use Facebook all day. (Side note: We don’t know where you apply for this job :P )
“The goal is to build the perfect personalized newspaper for 1.1 billion people and counting,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me in 2013… “That involves all these different kinds of content, and it involves figuring out what types of stuff people care about, which people they care about and the topics they care about.”
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To keep advertisers as well as the users interested, Facebook needs to know a lot about its users and as the following list (of data points it uses to target the ads) shows, it might know us better than we think.
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And then there’s Instagram!
When Zuckerberg decided to shell out nearly $1 billion in 2012 to buy the photo-sharing app, which had just 30 million users, it was widely seen as a sign of a new Silicon Valley bubble. But he appears to have outsmarted everyone once again. In the four years since the purchase, Instagram has become one of the fastest-growing platforms of all time, with about as many users as Twitter (310 million), Snapchat (100-million-plus) and Pinterest (100 million) combined.
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Lastly, the fascinating tussle of Instagram and Snapchat
In a sense, Snapchat wants to become a little more like Instagram so that it can appeal to advertisers, while Instagram wants to become a bit more like Snapchat so that it can lure younger users who don’t like the social pressure of a public feed.
Add-on: Demo of the work that Facebook is doing in VR.
Array of Awesome Reads is a curated list of reads related to a particular topic (may be broad or something precise) that are interesting, informative or inspirational. Or a combination of those attributes. And of course, that are truly worth reading.
Also, unless explicitly stated, we are not associated with the authors in any way. Happy Reading!
Zerone is an undergrad publication at I.O.E, Pulchowk focusing on People (their creative side, their thoughts, their lives) and Technology (the new, the old, everything).
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