On November 2, Facebook Inc. reported that its third-quarter profit soared considerably, but admitted that revenue growth would slow into next year as spending remains high.* Scared investors sent the stock into a dive, with Facebook shares falling more than 8% in late trading.* Facebook is certainly an interesting asset. We gathered some peculiar facts about this social media giant:
1) Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard College roommates. With time it gradually opens to most universities in the United States and Canada. Initially called Facemash, then changed to Thefacebook.
2) On September 26, 2006, Facebook was opened to the regular users, who were at least 13 years old and had a valid email address.
3) Al Pacino was the first “face” on Facebook. A very early version of the site displayed a header image with a man’s face obscured behind binary code, it later came to light that the face was that of famous actor, Al Pacino.
4) Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, was the first major investor to back Facebook. Thiel, a visionary in the startup and venture capital worlds, realised the site’s potential and invested $500,000 into the young company in 2004. He later sold his stake in the company for more than $1 billion.
5) Mark Zuckerberg suffers from red-green colorblindness. This is why Facebook’s primary color scheme is blue, blue is also strongly associated with trust and security.
6) Facebook’s ‘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 instead.
7) 50% of 18-24 year-olds go on Facebook when they wake up. Worldwide, there are over 1.71 billion monthly active Facebook users, which is a 15 percent increase year over year.
8) Globally, 38.6% of the online population use Facebook, spend an average of 20 minutes per day on the site. 81 million profiles on Facebook are fake.
9) About half of Facebook’s revenue comes from the US and Canada, with an average revenue per user of $15.08 in the quarter, compared with $3.89 per user worldwide.* Facebook is also receiving a boost from a big advertising push at Instagram, the photo app with 500m monthly active users.
10) Facebook’s stock went up by more than 25% this year.* This could be due to the fact that it emerged as the #1 social media ad platform during the US Election season, leaving Twitter to bite the dust.
Consider this chart:
* Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.
** Forecasts are not reliable indicator of future performance.
