"Despite tough advertising market, Facebook is expanding" by Brian Womack, Bloomberg News | April 29, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO - Facebook Inc. has plenty of money to overcome the economic slump and is adding new forms of interactive advertising that will boost sales 70 percent this year, Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer, said.
"We could not be doing better financially," Sandberg said in an interview last week. "We absolutely do not need to take money. We might take money - but it doesn't mean we need to."
Facebook is expanding amid the worst market for Internet advertising since the dot-com bust, and at a time when companies are still trying to figure out how to advertise on social-networking sites. While Facebook was "nervous" following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. last year, its confidence for ad sales "grows every week," Sandberg said.
"We're on a path, a clear path, to be cash-flow positive next year," said Sandberg, who joined Facebook from Google Inc. last year. She had previously served as chief of staff for the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton.
The challenge for Facebook, the most popular social-networking site, is that people aren't used to seeing ads on its pages, said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz.
"It's a very, very tough and discriminating audience," Weiner said. "I also don't think they've totally sold the vast array of potential advertisers and marketers on the value of Facebook."
Founded in 2004, Facebook has raised more than $400 million in equity funding, including a $240 million investment from Microsoft Corp. Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and venture capital firms Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners are among Facebook's other investors.
Although Facebook doesn't need more money, the company uses lease-financing for equipment purchases, Sandberg said. Sandberg, 39, said the company has improved its advertising offerings in the past year so they more closely resemble how the site works.
Facebook is also using information on users' profile pages to target ads, Tim Kendall, the company's director of monetization, said at a conference in San Francisco last week.
Clients are spending more on Facebook than they did before the financial crisis, which contrasts with industrywide declines reported by Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft, said Jordan Bitterman, a media buyer at Digitas, an online ad agency in New York.
Some companies have held off buying ads on Facebook because they worry about their brands being displayed next to pictures of scantily clad women or other questionable content, said Gaston Legorburu, chief creative officer at Boston-based Sapient Corp., which provides online advertising services to clients such as Coca-Cola Co.
Well, they sure might notice your ad.
Sandberg said the increase in visitors to Facebook, as well as the site's growing popularity with older visitors, give advertisers more potential customers.
Here's one older user that won't be facing up.
Facebook reached 200 million users this month, double the number from August last year. Much of the growth is coming from people ages 35 to 49. They accounted for about 34 percent of Facebook's US users in March, up from 27 percent a year earlier, according to researcher Nielsen Online. The percentage of users ages 18 to 24 was 7.6 percent, down from 17 percent a year earlier.
Young people getting sick of it?
One indication that 2009 is an important year: Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 24-year-old founder, has committed to wearing a tie every day to the office....
Another Zionist Jew that either founded or operates a telecom.
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