And this was the definitive breakthrough. In July 2009, Facebook passed the 250 million user mark and barely 1 year later the 500 millionth user was welcomed. On September 14, 2012, Facebook reached the long-awaited milestone of 1 billion users worldwide.
A world-class achievement. This means that almost 1 in 2 people in the world with internet access has a Facebook account. This makes Facebook not only the largest, but also the most visited site in the world. And Facebook continues to grow. In December 2013, Facebook had no less than 1.23 billion active users. In terms of visitor numbers, it has only one major competitor to tolerate: Google.
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Facebook users 2004-2012. Source: Statista.com
Photos, newsfeed and chat
Not only is the strong growth in users impressive, Facebook has developed enormously as a platform over the last 10 years. The starting point of the network has always been the profile page of the user himself. And in October 2005, the network launched a very important functionality: photos. Something that is inextricably linked to the network today.
In September 2006, the company launched the functionality that the average Facebook user in the Netherlands spends 6 hours and 2 minutes per month staring at: the newsfeed. A collection of your friends' activities and the brands you are a fan of on Facebook. The network quickly realized that users wanted personal contact with each other in addition to the newsfeed and introduced Facebook Chat in April 2008, now known as Facebook Messenger. This was followed by a number of other small introductions and in September 2011 the next innovation followed: the timeline.
The Facebook Timeline
The Facebook Timeline
All your important moments in chronological order, from birth to today. And still, every day there are more than 3,000 developers working on the further development of the platform. It is sometimes forgotten, but Facebook Engineers laid the foundation for many techniques that are now widely used on the internet. And they are still pioneers when it comes to things like cluster hosting, image compression and the Open Graph .
Fan page, ads and likes
Become a fan buttonWait a minute, fans? Aren't those your likes? That's right. The term fans also has its origins in the early years of Facebook. In November 2007, Facebook introduced the very first versions of the Facebook page for companies. And we can hardly imagine it now, but in the early days of the Facebook company page, there was a nice 'Become a Fan' button at the top. This button is the origin of the terms fan page and Facebook fans, which are still used today. It took until February 2009 before Facebook introduced the like button, which by the way recently got a small visual update .
At the same time as the Facebook business page, the self-service version of Facebook ads was launched in 2007. In recent years, the ads have also experienced explosive growth. What once started as a simple ad format consisting of a title, image and 120 characters of text on the right side on the desktop, has now grown into more than 20 different ad formats. With fantastic names, including Page Like Ads, Page Post Ads, Mobile App Install Ads and Domain ads. So many that Facebook has been busy reducing the number of ad formats in recent months .
The high level of targeting and the extensive options such as custom bosnia and herzegovina mobile phone number list audiences and FBX (re-targeting) are popular with advertisers: over the whole of 2013, Facebook generated 7.87 billion dollars in advertising revenue , 55 percent more than in 2012. This means that the company now accounts for 18 percent of the global advertising revenue in 2013. Last December, Facebook announced that it would show in-stream video advertisements in the news feed of users. With this, the network – just like Google with YouTube – is definitely competing with traditional TV commercials.
2012: Instagram and the IPO
2012 was an eventful year for Facebook. On May 18 of that year, Facebook made the long-awaited move to the stock exchange. Scenes took place around this IPO that reminded us of the dark days surrounding the dot.com crash of 2001. Under the euphoria of Facebook's strong growth, the IPO price on the stock exchange was far too optimistic. The share price quickly collapsed after the introduction. Fortunately, Facebook managed to restore investor confidence and the share price recently recovered strongly to well above the original IPO price.
Facebook Stock Price May 2012 - January 2014
Facebook stock price from May 2012 to January 2014
2012 was also the year that Facebook made its first major acquisition. Just before its IPO, it bought the popular mobile photo app Instagram for $1 billion . A smart move, because with this, Facebook not only bought the innovative technology of the still young company and a large community of photo enthusiasts, but it also eliminated a fast-growing potential competitor in one fell swoop.