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History has always taught us great things and sure to see and learn from the History of happening companies like Facebook will give us lot of insight into how their beginning was, and how they started and launched their company in initial days. Were they any different from any other startup? Let us find out.
Current status of Facebook 2012
One Billion Users on Facebook and Every 30 minutes, More than 6 million photos are uploaded, and 160 million stories find their way into the News Feed. Every hour, they send 10 billion IMs on Facebook and check out 20 billion profile pics. [source]
Facebook in 2004
4th Feb 2004 Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com after a week of coding and First article about Facebook was published by the “The Harvard Crimson ” on 9th Feb 2004. Within 2-3 days Facebook had 900 registered users and Mark’s word “I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” he said. “The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.”
Initially site allowed people with Harvard e-mail addresses to upload their pictures and personal and academic information. Just as with the popular website Friendster, which Zuckerberg said was a model for his new website, members can search for people according to their interests and can create an online network of friends.
Zuckerberg said that the most innovative feature of the site is that people can search for other students in their classes so that they can branch out to form friendships and study groups.
You can read the article here directly from “The Harvard Crimson“.
Facebook’s first Media Kit for advertisers
As we have seen in the movie ‘The Social Network’, the then CFO Eduardo Saverin wanted to monetize the company and had made this presentation for the advertisers, which gives lot of information on where Facebook stood at that time and what were its plan for the future. This media kit was got by Digiday.
You can clearly see the initial Facebook pitch was very different then how it is today and what they are projecting now. Facebook positioned itself as an online directory for students, alumni, faculty and staff.
And the final Sales pitch was “15 million college students with purchasing power of $85 billion. And college goers are also active job seekers. Also note : Just in a month it was getting 3 million daily page views.
True Story 🙂 Every startup goes through it.
So this was all from the much simpler and innocent times of Facebook. And here’s the most recent one ‘mission statement’ from Facebook
Does anything in Facebook’s Media Kit surprises you? Share your thoughts!
