History of Facebook (Corporate affairs)
Corporate affairs
Management
The ownership percentages of the company, as of 2012, are: Mark Zuckerberg: 28%,[83] Accel Partners: 10%, Digital Sky Technologies: 10%,[84] Dustin Moskovitz: 6%, Eduardo Saverin: 5%,Sean Parker: 4%, Peter Thiel: 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners: between 1 to 2% each, Microsoft: 1.3%, Li Ka-shing: 0.8%, the Interpublic Group: less than 0.5%. A small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, Adam D'Angelo, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta, while Reid Hoffmanand Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company. The remaining 30% or so are owned by employees, an undisclosed number of celebrities, and outside investors.[85] Adam D'Angelo, former chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.[86]
Key management personnel comprise Chris Cox (VP of Product), Sheryl Sandberg (COO), and Mark Zuckerberg (Chairman and CEO). As of April 2011, Facebook has over 2,000 employees, and offices in 15 countries.[87] Other managers include chief financial officer David Ebersman and public relations head Elliot Schrage.[88]
Revenue
| Year | Revenue | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | $52[91] | — |
| 2007 | $150[92] | 188% |
| 2008 | $280[93] | 87% |
| 2009 | $775[94] | 177% |
| 2010 | $2,000[95] | 158% |
| 2011 | $4,270[96] | 114% |
Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major Web sites. According to BusinessWeek.com, banner advertisements on Facebook have generally received one-fifth the number of clicks compared to those on the Web as a whole,[97] although specific comparisons can reveal a much larger disparity. For example, while Google users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of 8% of the time (80,000 clicks for every one million searches),[98] Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).[99]
Sarah Smith, who was Facebook's Online Sales Operations Manager, reports that successful advertising campaigns on the site can have clickthrough rates as low as 0.05% to 0.04%, and that CTR for ads tend to fall within two weeks.[100] By comparison, the CTR for competing social network MySpace is about 0.1%, about 2.5 times better than Facebook's rate but still low compared to many other Web sites. The cause of Facebook's low CTR has been attributed to younger users enabling ad blocking software and being better at ignoring advertising messages, as well as the site being used more for the purpose of social communication as opposed to viewing content.[101]
On pages for brands and products, however, some companies have reported CTR as high as 6.49% for Wall posts.[102] A study found that, for video advertisements on Facebook, over 40% of users who viewed the videos viewed the entire video, while the industry average was 25% for in-banner video ads.[103]
Mergers and acquisitions
Main article: List of acquisitions by Facebook
On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced it had acquired the domain name fb.com from the American Farm Bureau Federation for an undisclosed amount. On January 11, 2011, the Farm Bureau disclosed $8.5 million in "domain sales income", making the acquisition of FB.com one of the ten highest domain sales in history.[104]
Offices
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California.
All users outside of the US and Canada have a contract with Facebook's Irish subsidiary "Facebook Ireland Limited". This allows Facebook to avoid US taxes for all users in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. Facebook is making use of the Double Irish arrangement which allows it to pay just about 2-3% corporation tax on all international revenue.[105]
Facebook, which in 2010 had more than 750 million active users globally including over 23 million in India, announced that its Hyderabad centre would house online advertising and developer support teams and provide round-the-clock, multi-lingual support to the social networking site's users and advertisers globally.[110] With this, Facebook joins other giants like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, IBM and Computer Associates that have already set up shop.[111] In Hyderabad, it is registered as 'Facebook India Online Services Pvt Ltd'.[112][113][114]
Though Facebook did not specify its India investment or hiring figures, it said recruitment had already begun for a director of operations and other key positions at Hyderabad,[115] which would supplement its operations in California, Dublin in Ireland as well as at Austin, Texas.
A custom-built data center with substantially reduced ("38% less") power consumption compared to existing Facebook data centers opened in April 2011 in Prineville, Oregon.[116]
In April 2012 Facebook opened a second data center in Forest City, North Carolina.
On October 1, 2012, CEO Zuckerberg visited Moscow to stimulate social media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook’s position in the Russian market.[117] Russia's communications minister tweeted that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev urged the social media giant's founder to abandon plans to lure away Russian programmers and instead consider opening a research center in Moscow. Facebook has roughly 9 million users in Russia, whiledomestic analogue VK has around 34 million.[118]
Open source contributions
Facebook is both a consumer of and contributor to free and open source software.[119] Facebook's contributions include: HipHop for PHP,[120] Fair scheduler in Apache Hadoop,[121] Apache Hive, Apache Cassandra,[122] and the Open Compute Project.[123]
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