Facebook is within reach of 2 billion users

Facebook now reaches 1.86 billion monthly active users, having added 70 million users in the quarter.
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From all those billions, Facebook pulled in $8.8 billion in revenue over the quarter, but the numbers get quite staggering when you look at the year overall. While in 2015, Facebook bought in $17.9 billion, the company closed out 2016 with $27.6 billion.
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 For ad revenue, mobile represents 84 percent of the total
http://mashable.com/2017/02/01/facebook-earnings-record-user-growth/#Sdjn3KPuciq3

Are Facebook and Google really taking all the digital ad growth?

Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research, calculated that Facebook and Google took 74.6 percent of the digital ad growth in the U.S. in 2015, and about 98 percent of the growth in the first half of 2016. 

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Many researchers base their overall ad spend estimates off Interactive Advertising Bureau surveys. Although IAB surveys, undertaken by PricewaterhouseCoopers, are widely recognized within the advertising industry, they, like all surveys, cannot capture every company operating on the internet.

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Another important caveat is the distinction between gross and net revenue. Research that shows Facebook and Google receive all the digital ad growth is examining gross revenue, which means it’s only tracking how money flowed through the channels.

Tracking gross revenue is relevant, even if it doesn’t tell you where the money winds up. Google and Facebook receiving all the gross revenue growth indicates that publishers are losing direct relationships with buyers, Wieser said. Even if publishers indirectly receive a portion of the spend flowing through Facebook and Google, they lose control over the deal terms as more spend is directed through the platforms, he said.
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 EMarketer is one firm that forecasts net revenue. Its research predicts that Google and Facebook will account for 57.6 percent of net revenue growth in worldwide digital advertising in 2016.
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An enormous chunk of money sits in between eMarketer’s 58 percent net growth estimate and Pivotal’s 98 percent gross growth estimate.
 http://digiday.com/platforms/facebook-google-really-taking-digital-ad-growth/

Martin Sorrell says WPP will spend $5 billion with Google this year — and they're better to deal with than Facebook

WPP will spend at least $5 billion (£4.1 billion) of its clients money on Google ads this year, the advertising agency holding company's CEO Sir Martin Sorrell said on its third-quarter earnings call on Monday.
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As for Facebook — where WPP spent $1 billion (£830 million) in 2015 — the relationship isn't quite as good.
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Unilever CMO Keith Weed has called on digital media companies, including Facebook, to provide what he calls the "3Vs" — viewability, verification, and value — to prove they are being transparent about the success of ad campaigns on their platforms. 
http://www.businessinsider.com/wpp-google-spend-5-billion-relationship-better-than-facebook-2016-10?r=US&IR=T&IR=T

Facebook-thirsty publishers turn to celebrities to worm into the news feed

Facebook is choking off reach in the news feed, so publishers are getting more creative with how to get their content in front of audiences there. One popular method: pay celebrities for sharing it.

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The strategy is the bread and butter of a whole host of lightweight publishers, but it’s also been embraced by A-list publishers like Rolling Stone and Slate too, which pay by the click for celebs, as well as a whole host of other popular Facebook pages, to post their stories. Some deals take place through influencer media networks while some celebrities work directly with publishers. In other cases, publishers add themselves to networks like Contempo and pay only when celebs decide to share the content.
“There’s a ton of publications that have almost become built solely on this [distribution mechanism],” said Ken Wohl, the co-founder of Cybrid Media, a company that helped Elite Daily triple the size of its Facebook audience.
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Of course, like many “growth hacking” tactics, this one skirts rules. Facebook requires verified page owners to disclose any commercial nature of the content posted to those pages, something that these celebs do not do.
And also like many hacks, it’s one that’s attracted competition. In the past year, a cottage industry of companies like Providr and FanBread has sprung up that creates content for those same influencers, giving said celebs a chance to earn much higher returns on their social reach. These companies, which build scale for the advertisers across the sites, take a cut of the advertising revenue.
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Everybody realized there was a major arbitrage opportunity, where publishers could buy traffic from influencers for far less than it cost to advertise on Facebook.
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Today, sources say that a publisher can still buy a visit to their website for as little as 1 cent, far less than the cost of buying from Facebook directly.
http://digiday.com/publishers/facebook-thirsty-publishers-turn-celebrities-worm-news-feed/
http://www.providr.com/
http://fanbread.com/

Wall Street Thinks Facebook Has Room to Grow

In terms of daily average users, Wall Street is predicting Facebook will reach 1.7 billion in four years, up from the current 1.1 billion. In that time frame Barron’s argues Facebook will have figured out how to turn ads into transactions, which will enable it to charge higher rates for advertisers on its platforms.

http://www.investopedia.com/news/wall-street-thinks-facebook-has-room-grow-fb/

98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you

Facebook, in its omniscience, knows that you’re wondering — and it would like to reassure you. The social network just revamped its ad preference settings to make them significantly easier for users to understand. They’ve also launched a new ad education portal, which explains, in general terms, how Facebook targets ads.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/08/19/98-personal-data-points-that-facebook-uses-to-target-ads-to-you/

https://www.facebook.com/ads/about/?entry_product=ad_preferences 

 

Facebook is all set to snub ad blockers by altering their own code

Ads on Facebook will now appear as sponsored content pieces, shielding them from ad blockers.

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Facebook has come up with a new way of displaying ads on the social media platform. As per a blogpost by the company, Facebook will now display ads in the garb of sponsored content, shielding them from various ad blockers.  

http://www.digit.in/internet/facebook-is-all-set-to-snub-ad-blockers-by-altering-their-own-code-31315.html

Facebook's average revenue per user - TheAtlas

https://www.theatlas.com/tag/technology
https://www.theatlas.com/charts/rkyEJtvK

How Much Do IPO-Bound Internet Companies Spend On Marketing?

The flagging growth at LinkedIn and Twitter have required some propping up by additional sales and marketing.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-much-do-ipo-bound-internet-companies-spend-mahesh-vellanki

Så dominant är Facebook

En undersökning från Mediavision visar att 49% av svenskar i åldern 15-74 år dagligen konsumerar nyheter på Facebook.
Det gör Facebook till en av de största plattformarna för nyheter, sett till daglig räckvidd.
http://www.dagensmedia.se/medier/digitalt/sa-dominant-ar-facebook-6544602

Facebook Wants You to Post More About Yourself

Overall sharing has remained "strong," according to Facebook. However, people have been less willing to post updates about their lives as their lists of friends grow.

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Instead, Facebook’s 1.6 billion users are posting more news and information from other websites.

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 Personal sharing has shifted to smaller audiences on Snapchat, Facebook’s Instagram and other messaging services.

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Original sharing of personal stories -- rather than posts about public information like news articles -- dropped 21 percent year over year as of mid-2015, The Information, a tech news site, reported Wednesday.  

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-07/facebook-said-to-face-decline-in-people-posting-personal-content

Mobile users spend about 30 minutes a day on Facebook. Nobody else is even close

The number of monthly average mobile users for each social network in the U.S., and the total mobile minutes spent on each network every day in the U.S.. Based on those two numbers, the average mobile Facebook user spends about 30 minutes each day interacting on the social network. Snapchat is a distant second, with 8.5 minutes.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/mobile-user-engagement-with-social-media-2016-4

Bots, the next frontier

“YOU are a developer and you’ve just spent two weeks writing this amazing app. What is your dream? Your dream is to get it in front of every iPhone user.” That was how Steve Jobs, then Apple’s boss, introduced an online shop for smartphone apps eight years ago. At first few paid it much heed, but it launched one of the fastest-growing software markets ever. Since then over 100 billion apps have been downloaded, generating $40 billion in revenues for developers and billions more in subscriptions and other fees.
At a conference on April 12th in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, is expected to make a similar announcement. He will probably unveil an online shop and coding tools for “chatbots”. These are text-based services which let users complete tasks such as checking news, organising meetings, ordering food or booking a flight by sending short messages. Bots are usually powered by artificial intelligence (hence the name, as in “robot”), but may also rely on humans. Many in the technology industry hope that Facebook’s event will mark the beginning of another fast-growing, multi-billion-dollar software economy. Are bots the new apps?
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Text-based services have been around since the dawn of internet time, but the birth of the bot economy can be dated to June last year, when Telegram, a messaging app with Russian origins and more than 100m users, launched a bot platform and a “bot store”. It now counts thousands of bots, such as news alerts from media organisations, or feeds that link to football videos or porn.
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A few dozens startups exist. Some provide tools: Chatfuel is a web-based offering that lets users build bots for Telegram. Others offer specialised services: Digit allows users to interact with their bank accounts and find ways to save money; Pana is an online travel agency that takes text messages and turns them into bookings. MeeKan sets up meetings for users of Slack, a popular corporate-messaging service.
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Assist aims to be the equivalent of Google’s search box—to find bots.
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Much like web pages, they live on servers, not a user’s device, meaning they are easier to create and update. This is likely to make them attractive to businesses which have shied away from developing their own apps, such as restaurants and shops.
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The popularity of messaging apps suggests people will happily talk to bots. But much will depend on “killer bots”—hugely popular services that work best in the form of bots.
http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21696477-market-apps-maturing-now-one-text-based-services-or-chatbots-looks-poised

How Facebook became an advertising behemoth

Today Facebook is the sixth most valuable public company in the world, with a market value of around $325 billion. Last year it had revenues of $18 billion, more than double two years earlier.

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Facebook also focused on engineering a highly addictive product that people would come back frequently to check. This meant investing in perfecting algorithms that surfaced relevant content for users. Today Americans spend 22% of their mobile-internet time on Facebook’s flagship social network, compared to 11% with Google search and YouTube combined.

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The most important factor in transforming Facebook into a huge business is the amount of data it collects. Users willingly share lots with Facebook, such as their interests, biography, location and friends. Facebook can also track where else users travel online: anything with a “like” button feeds back information to Facebook, as do other sites that let people use their Facebook credentials to log on. No other web company, with the exception of Google, has as much data about users as Facebook collects. This is the foundation of Facebook’s success. Advertisers are able to reach users with great precision, based on what Facebook knows about them, and are spending a huge share of their online advertising budgets on the social network.  

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Facebook has cleverly snapped up would-be competitors, buying Instagram, a photo-sharing site, in 2012 and WhatsApp, a popular messaging service, in 2014. This has only increased the amount of time and information Facebook claims.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/04/economist-explains-4

State of Social U.S. 2016: Fact Book

http://www.shareablee.com/resources.html
http://insights.shareablee.com/the-state-of-social-us-2016-fact-book

Facebook Audience Network Hits $1B In Revs, Most To Publishers

Facebook’s Audience Network achieved a major financial milestone in the fourth quarter of the year. For the first time, it achieved an annual run rate of $1 billion in revenue. 

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/266179/facebook-audience-network-hits-1b-in-revs-most-t.html 

 

Al Jazeera's distributed content unit generated 2.2 billion Facebook video views in 2015

Al Jazeera’s 15-month-old digital-only offshoot, AJ+, has made a big bet on distributed content, trading a website for an editorial strategy centered on building audiences directly on Facebook and other platforms. Its output, focused on social issues, is created with mobile viewing in mind — which is to say, short, sharable and made so that it can be viewed with the sound off.

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AJ+’s 70-person content team produces around 50 videos a week, most of which are about a minute long

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Distributed content strategies have become the latest flavor of the month for publishers, which are looking to boost their reach by teaming up with and creating content directly for platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. The likes of BuzzFeed, Business Insider, Quartz and Fusion have all made it core to their growth strategies.

http://digiday.com/publishers/al-jazeeras-distributed-content-unit-generated-2-2-bil-facebook-video-views-2015/
https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish

Facebook Tests Interest-Specific News Feeds on Mobile

People Can Customize the New Feeds Categorized by Topics Like Style, Travel

http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-tests-breaking-news-feed-interest-sections/301958/ 

 

The Unofficial Facebook Advanced Search Engine

Search Is Back turns your simple menu selections into the proper URL and sends you to the search results page on Facebook’s official site with no extra login required. Unfortunately, the product usually only works for people in the US who have received the Graph Search rollout.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/02/facebook-advanced-search/
https://searchisback.com/

Facebook is coming out on top of digital advertising growth

What's more, Facebook says its three popular mobile apps -- Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram -- combine to represent an average 46 minutes of use per day, per mobile user. If accurate, that would represent nearly a quarter of all mobile use. That's likely why eMarketer expects Facebook to continue gobbling up share of the mobile ad market over the next few years, even as more companies make mobile their focus.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-coming-out-on-top-of-digital-advertising-growth-2015-12