How Facebook Started, Grew & Became a $138 Billion Company Facebook is the most popular social media networking app existing today It allows for the sharing of pictures, exchange of messages and pictures publicly and privately in addition to sharing of data and information. This amazing app is used by more than two billion visitors with a valid email address and above the age of 13 years per month. How Facebook Started Clearly understanding the importance of coding, Mark Zuckerberg’s father Edward taught him Atari BASIC computer programming which he became very adept at. As he grew into a young man and had turned down two of the biggest tech companies in the world, Zuckerberg headed off to Harvard in 2002. One year later Zuckerberg attracted his first big controversy in October 2003 when he created and published Facemash, a website that let Harvard students judge the attractiveness of each other to create rankings (similar to the Hot or Not site that launched in 2000). As he didn’t actually get permission to use student photos, unsurprisingly many were not happy with his work. However within a few hours, the site had seen 22000 photo views from 450 visitors, but within a few days it was shut down and Zuckerberg was hauled in front of the Harvard Administration Board for breaching individual privacy. With the risk of expulsion on the table, the board finally decided to let him stay. After a public apology, he moved on from his first brush with authority and set his sights on his next project. Being inspired by a statement on Harvard Crimson about Facemash stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available, the benefits are many." Mark went on to create Facebook. He started writing codes for Facebook in January 2004. He launched TheFacebook located at thefacebook.com in February 2004. With a slightly different name, the platform was familiar.It had a profile where you could upload a photo, share your interests, and connect with other people. It also offered a network visualization of your connections. According to Mark's Dustin Moskovitz, the site had "twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants" within twenty-four hours. Six days after the release of the site, Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of deceiving them. Zuckerberg had previously worked on a similar project with them but he eventually quit in order to design TheFacebook. But his ex-collaborators insisted that he stole their concept and ideas and they wanted recompense. The matter was eventually settled. Membership was initially restricted to Havard students. At the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate students in Harvard had registered on TheFacebook. By the end of 2004, membership was open to nearly all universities in the US and Canada and even more, people were clamoring to sign up. The company was incorporated in summer 2004 and Sean Parker, an entrepreneur who was Zuckerberg's informal adviser was made the company's president. After buying the domain facebook.com from AboutFace Corporation for US$200,000, the company removed "The" from its name in April 2005. In May 2005 Facebook received investments of $12.7m from Accel and $1m from the personal fortune of venture capitalist Jim Breyer. By December 2005 the number of Facebook users had climbed to 6 million including employees of companies like Apple Inc and Microsoft. In May 2007, Facebook opened its Marketplace, which let users post pages to sell products and services. It also saw the launch of the Facebook Application Developer platform, opening the gates for developers to create their own applications and games that integrated with Facebook. The platform was also looking beyond personal profiles to how businesses could use the site. By the end of 2007 over 100,000 companies had signed up, with Facebook launching Pages for Businesses to support this. At this point, it was already making plans to build on existing ad revenue to make advertising on the platform accessible to even the smallest of businesses. That same year, Microsoft announced that it acquired 1.6% shares worth $240 million giving Microsoft the right to place international adverts on Facebook. Facebook’s Steps to Success In the five years since Facebook’s launch it had become so widespread that in 2009 Entertainment Weekly included the social networking site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list with the remark, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" That same year one of the big Facebook games appeared. Farmville was released in June 2009 and, despite being a rip off of a game called Farm Town, became a huge success. By August it had 10million daily active users. Then, finally, in December 2009, Facebook hit a major milestone. With 350million registered users and 132million unique monthly users, it becomes the most popular social platform in the world. Of course, the company wasn’t planning to leave it at that. In July 2010, Facebook had a total of 500 million users, half of which used Facebook for 34 minutes daily on the average. According to SecondMarketInc, Facebook's value was $41 billion as at November 2010 making the company the third largest American web company after Google and Amazon, slightly displacing eBay. That same year FaceMash was auctioned off to an undisclosed buyer for $30,201 by Rahul Jain, a banker. The company announced plans to moves its headquarters to Menlo Park, California in early 2011. In April 2012 Facebook made a major acquisition: Instagram. Spending $1bn. This was just a month before the year’s big event. The IPO. In May Zuckerberg was finally ready to take Facebook public. The company was valued at $104bn with $38 a share. When all was said and done, the IPO raised a huge $161m, but there was trouble ahead. The IPO was dogged with accusations of improper behavior by underwriters and technical issues, while Facebook lost a quarter of its stock value in the process; all in one month. The IPO was declared a “fiasco” by the Wall Street Journal and by June 6 investors had collectively lost $40bn. Over 40 lawsuits relating to the IPO were then filed. It was suggested that the underwriters, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs may have acted inappropriately. There were reports they secretly cut revenue estimates mid-IPO, while there were accusations that information was fed to the underwriters from Facebook that led them to cash out. Regardless of the issues it faced, Facebook carried on. By October 2012 the platform saw its 1 billionth registered user with revenue greater than $3 billion. The Facebook Graph Search was introduced on January 15, 2013. It provided an exact answer other than a link to searches. Facebook Home was introduced on April 3, 2013, and was a user interface for Android users. HTC went on to release HTC First with Facebook Home pre-loaded on it. In that same year, Facebook modified its logo, removing the faint blue line under the 'F' and by the end of the year, the company recorded income of $523 million and a total of 945 million mobile users. In February 2014 Facebook announced that it would buyWhatsApp for an incredible $19bn. While Facebook already had a messaging system, this acquisition gave the access to WhatsApp’s younger user base and its overseas users. By January 2019, Facebook introduced the 10-year challenge where users would post one photograph from 10 years ago (2009) together with a more recent photo. Facebook in 2018 Facebook is now available in about 140 languages. As of January 2018, it was visited by 2.2 million active users monthly. As at 2018, the company had revenue and net income upwards of $40 billion and $15 billion respectively with 30,275 employees. As at Sep, 2018 Facebook's Net Worth was estimated to be $138.3Billion Thank you very much for watching our videos. We’ll like to give you another interesting video for you to enjoy next but before then, our team will be very happy if you can like this Video and share it with your friends on social media. If you’re new here, don’t forget to subscribe so you won’t miss other interesting videos like this. Look at your screen now to see two other videos we handpicked for you to enjoy next. We love you
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