Facebook

Facebook (stylized as facebook) is an American for-profit corporation and online social media
and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California, United States. The Facebook website was
launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and
roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students; however, later
they expanded it to higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford
University. Facebook gradually added support for students at various other universities, and eventually to
high school students as well. Since 2006, anyone age 13 and older has been allowed to become a
registered user of Facebook, though variations exist in the minimum age requirement, depending on
applicable local laws.The Facebook name comes from the face book directories often given to United
States university students.
Facebook may be accessed by a large range of desktops, laptops, tablet computers, and
smartphones over the Internet and mobile networks. After registering to use the site, users can create a
user profile indicating their name, occupation, schools attended and so on. Users can add other users as
"friends", exchange messages, post status updates and digital photos, share digital videos and links, use
various software applications ("apps"), and receive notifications when others update their profiles or make
posts. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups organized by workplace, school, hobbies
or other topics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". In
groups, editors can pin posts to top. Additionally, users can complain about or block unpleasant people.
Because of the large volume of data that users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny
for its privacy policies. Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertisements which appear onscreen.
Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering (IPO) in February 2012, and began selling stock to
the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion. On July 13,
2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to reach a market cap of
$250 billion. Facebook has more than 1.65 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2016. As of April
2016, Facebook was the most popular social networking site in the world, based on the number of active
user accounts.

21 Amazing Facebook Facts You Didnt Know

Love it or hate it, theres no getting away from Facebook. The social media behemoths
influence can be seen in every corner of the Web, from the sites growing underground popularity in
China (where the site is banned) to the fact that approximately 30% of American adults get their news
from Facebook.
As youd expect from the worlds most popular social media site, Facebook has a fascinating story
and more than a few trivia tidbits that might surprise you. Here are 21 amazing facts about Facebook
that will prove just how remarkable the site really is, and may offer a glimpse of what we can expect from
Zuckerberg and his team in Menlo Park in the future.
1. Al Pacino was the first face on Facebook. A very early iteration of the site displayed a
header image featuring a mans face obscured behind binary code. The identity of the man could not be
seen clearly, but it later came to light that the face was that of acclaimed actor Al Pacino.

2. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, was the first major investor to back Facebook. Thiel, a
luminary in the startup and venture capital worlds, saw the sites potential and invested $500,000 into the
young company in 2004. Thiel later sold his stake in the company for more than $1 billion.
3. Sean Parker, co-founder of now-defunct music sharing site Napster, originally acquired
the facebook.com domain name for $200,000. Parker was the driving force in the renaming of the site,
and was highly influential as the site exploded in popularity.
4. A peer-to-peer file-sharing system called Wirehog was once a core function of
Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg introduced the P2P file-sharing system when Thefacebook.com reached
approximately 500,000 users, and once believed it would become a central component of the site.
Wirehog was retired over fears of potential legal repercussions of copyright infringement in 2006.
5. Mark Zuckerberg suffers from red-green colorblindness. This is why Facebooks primary
color scheme is blue although it certainly doesnt hurt that blue is also strongly associated with trust and
security, two concepts essential in getting people to voluntarily part with their personal information.
6. Facebooks Like button used to be the Awesome button. Facebook engineer Andrew
Bosworth said that he and other engineers were enthusiastic about the Awesome button, but that the
idea was ultimately vetoed by Zuckerberg in 2007. The site eventually settled on the Like button, a
decision that Bosworth said was met with a decidedly lukewarm reception.
7. Facebook stores approximately 300 PETABYTES of user data on its servers. There are 1
million gigabytes in a petabyte. The entire written works of humankind, in every known language
(including Latin and other historical languages) from the dawn of recorded history, would
occupy approximately 50 petabytes. Think about that for a minute.
8. In 2014, the alleged global economic impact of Facebook was approximately $227 billion.
However, this statistic (and the methodology behind it) has been called in question by several leading
economists. Whether you buy Facebooks data or not, theres no doubt that Facebook has had a serious
impact on economies around the world.
9. Facebooks user base grows by eight people per second, or 7,246 people every 15
minutes.Some naysayers have foretold of Facebooks impending demise, but aside from boasting the
largest user base of any social network in the world by a gigantic margin, this statistic proves Facebook is
still growing.
10. In 2015, Facebook boasted 22% of WORLDWIDE mobile Internet advertising
revenue. That means almost one-quarter of all advertising revenue generated from mobile Internet ads in
a single year went to Facebook.
11. Adult Facebook users in the United States spend 68% of their mobile device time using
apps.Despite this, there were only approximately 8,400 app advertisers on Facebook in 2013 and these
8,400 advertisers drove more than 145 million app installs in that year alone.
12. There are now more than 2 million active advertisers on Facebook. The popularity, impact,
and cost-effectiveness of Facebook ads has made the site one of the most popular online advertising
platforms in the world, and its upward trajectory seems likely to continue.
13. Facebook ads targeting custom audiences have 14% lower cost-per-click and 64% lower
cost-per-conversions than ads utilizing interest- or category-based targeting, on average. In addition,

Facebook ads using custom audience targeting had conversion rates 387% higher than ads only using
demographic targeting.
14. The Facebook advertising format with the lowest cost-per-click is the Sponsored Page
Action Story format, which has an average CPC of just $0.11. The ad format with the highest CPC is
the Sponsored App Action Story, which has an average CPC of $0.58.
15. The Facebook advertising format with the highest click-through rate is the Sponsored
Place Check-In Story, which has an average CTR of 3.2%. The ad format with the lowest CTR is the
Inline Like format, which has an average CTR of 0.03%. (Ibid.)
16. Facebook earns an average of $5.85 for every Facebook user in the United States and
Canada. These two countries also have among the highest monthly active users of any country in the
world, making North America a vitally important market for Facebook.
17. Every minute of downtime outage costs Facebook approximately $24,420. The
prolonged outage that lasted for 19 minutes in August 2014 cost the company almost $427,000 and
you thought you were pissed when Facebook goes down.
18. Posts published between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. EST receive approximately 88% more
interactions on average than posts published at other times of the day. Also, ending posts with a
question lifts interactions with those posts by an average of 162%.
19. In September 2014, Facebook users watched a collective 1 billion videos per day. Today,
that figure is more than 4 billion and 75% of these video views occur on mobile devices.
20. Videos are the most-shared content type on Facebook. On average, videos receive 89.5
shares per video, significantly higher share counts than photos or text-based posts.
21. Posting just once or twice per day on Facebook yields an average of 40% more
engagement than posting three or more times per day. This shows that, despite marketers best efforts
to beat Facebooks rapidly declining organic reach, you cant just use brute force to make yourself heard.