
How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004 - sohlis
http://www.digiday.com/platforms/how-eduardo-saverin-sold-facebook-ads-in-2004/
======
dlokshin
In the very beginning (2004 when I was a freshman), I remember being able to
buy ads myself, for something like $10 for 1,000 views. This was really,
really popular. People would advertise all sorts of things like parties,
furniture, etc. A really popular advertisement was for roommates to pitch in
and buy 10,000 views of "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY! WE LOVE YOU!" and a picture of
the blocking group to the left.

These advertisements were great because they were SUPER TARGETED, directed
towards me by someone I probably knew. I remember sitting at my desk,
refreshing the page just to see which new ads popped up. It was wonderful!

~~~
demione
What a novel concept: users actually wanting to create and see ads because
they are so incredibly targeted and relevant. I wonder at what point facebook
lost their grasp around such a tightly coupled ecosystem.

~~~
timdorr
When they got rid of Networks. As they moved outside of schools, the natural
grouping of everyone in the system around your college (and later by company)
was lost. The Groups feature never really re-captured this kind of dynamic
because the new groups are inherently smaller and not forced.

Another big factor was the introduction of the news feed. Now people are doing
the same thing as ads (though, on a smaller scale) by posting updates and
having them read through the news feeds of their friends. The old 2004 ads
were the only way to communicate between users without posting on their wall.

------
csallen
Does anyone remember the icons you could buy for your friends' birthdays on
Facebook? These came quite a bit later than 2004... I would guess ~2006. At
first all of my friends balked at the idea of spending $1 on a gif. But it
wasn't too long before I started seeing a couple of these appear on people's
walls every time they had a birthday.

Given the sheer number of people on Facebook, I assumed this would eventually
turn into a decent source of revenue for them. But then they unexpectedly got
rid of it. Does anyone know why? As a company, Facebook kind of "owns" the
birthday, so I've always wondered why they haven't tried to capitalize on it
similarly to how the diamond industry capitalized on marriage.

~~~
remi
Trivia: these icons were designed by Susan Kare
(<http://www.kare.com/portfolio/01_facebook1.html>) who also designed some of
the most famous Macintosh icons
(<http://www.kare.com/portfolio/03_apple_macicons.html>).

~~~
sadlyNess
And the Firefox icon too. *<http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/the-icon-
handbook>

~~~
remi
Actually, John Hicks did the Firefox icon:
<http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/branding-firefox>

------
ajays
The power of Facebook advertising is not on showing ads on their own pages.
Very few people look at the ads on FB's pages, and many (most?) people browse
FB on mobile devices, where advertising is very hard.

No, the power of FB (and its future, IMHO) lies in FB becoming a data
provider. So when you visit a page, the advertisers query FB about this
opportunity, and based on the answer, pick an ad or decide how much to bid.
And FB then collects 25% of the ad's price as a fee. Given that online
advertising is a $30B market, you can imagine FB will have no problems making
a lot of revenue.

------
instakill
That looks like a standard advertising pitch deck that you'd expect to see
from any large publisher in the last year or so. Quite impressive for a
college student in 2004.

------
dm8
It's interesting to see how they saw Facebook in 2004. For them it was a
college directory and their biggest milestone was reaching all the schools in
US.

Their pitch deck looks mature. It covers all the major points; product,
audience profiling, targeting, growth, future plans etc.

------
qq66
Looking at things like this pitch deck and Gabby Douglas' post-medal
interview, I'm amazed by how mature some people become while they are still
teenagers. If I was pitching Facebook today as a near-30-year-old business
school graduate, my deck would be only somewhat better than this one produced
by a college freshman. Had I attempted it when I was 17 it would have been a
total disaster.

------
tsurantino
I don't understand why Facebook got rid of so many features that made Facebook
as targeted as it was.

For example, I'm in university right now and I would love to have a course
application that was in one of those powerpoint slides. Instead, there is some
stupid textbox which makes me arbitrarily assign certain text fields that
don't help me strengthen my friend network at all.

At this point, Facebook has become so generic to the point where it's boring.
I think the same point can be drawn to why their ad system fails. It's too
diluted and irrelevant.

------
chintan
2004: 90mm pageviews @ $0.5 CPM ~ $50K per mnth in revenue.

2012: 1 Trillion pageviews @ $0.5 CPM ~ $500mm per mnth in revenue

* <http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/index.html>

* * Assuming full inventory

~~~
xal
Crazy that Facebook has an order of magnitude more Page Views as anyone else.

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zinssmeister
It's nice to see that a Goliath like facebook also started out a david.

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gavinbaker
Based on what I read in the Facebook Effect he did sell ads, and wanted to
sell more but advertising wasn't a focus in 2004-6. As a marketing person
myself, I have a soft spot for him and do always wonder why he is made the
villain in the Facebook story. Anyone know?

------
zerostar07
Hard to believe he used Times font. Probably font substitution. Also does
anyone know who is the guy posterized in their original logo?

~~~
spolsky
Al Pacino.

~~~
kmavm
A common misconception. It was Peter Wolf, lead singer of the J. Geils Band.

[http://www.quora.com/Who-was-the-Facebook-Guy-in-the-
origina...](http://www.quora.com/Who-was-the-Facebook-Guy-in-the-original-
Facebook-logo)

------
cantbecool
"... explaining that marketer’s could target by sexual orientation or even by
dorm." Targeting by your dorm would seem a bit creepy.

~~~
conradfr
Marketing yourself toward some girls dorm across the campus seems great :)

~~~
throwaway54-762
No, it sounds creepy.

~~~
ATYT
Depends on just how cocky/good-looking the "creep" is.

~~~
JonnieCache
Nope. It's still weird, even if the creepee likes it.

Go there and talk to them. Why did you move to a campus?

------
codegeek
quite impressive deck.

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grzaks
He didn't manage to get a single advertiser right?

~~~
PakG1
I don't think that's plausible, he would have to had at least a few small
ones. And if I recall my memory of reading Facebook Effect and Accidental
Billionaires, both books say that he was able to get something, though nothing
big.

But more importantly, does that matter? There are tons of great projects here
on HN that are never able to get any customers. Does that make their work any
less impressive? Let's judge the work for the work itself, not whether or not
it achieved something. Obviously, it's a dog-eat-dog world, but you wouldn't
look at a founder with a string of failures and automatically come to the
conclusion that the person doesn't know how to do a startup. Luck, economic
environment, and a host of other issues come into play. Judge the work for its
own merit.

~~~
grzaks
My question was more ... well, just a question. I was hoping somebody will
either confirm that or deny.

~~~
PakG1
If it was simply just a question, I would have imagined that a more natural
phrasing would be: "Did he manage to get any advertisers?" And if you wanted
to make it really clear (although not necessary at all), I imagine you could
say something like: "Just curious, did he manage to get any advertisers?" The
words that you did use dripped with condescension, no?

