(This has been sent in by one of our readers, 99firms.com. This Website may or may not agree with the views expressed therein.)
No matter how anyone tries to wish it away, Facebook is here to stay. The popular social networking Site has extended its massive reach to virtually all corners of the Web, from its growing underground popularity in China (where it has been banned since July 2009) to the fact that there are more than 317,000 status updates every minute.
As you’d expect from the 15-year-old social media Site, Facebook has a long history, & many surprising facts that would interest you.
Here’s a compilation highlighting the most interesting ones:
-
The earliest version of Facebook was Facemash, which was launched on October 28, 2003 by Mark Zuckerberg & co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, & Eduardo Saverin.
-
That early Site was later updated to Thefacebook.com, which launched on February 4, 2004.
-
By June of the same year, the company received their first investment from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, for $500,000. He later sold his stake in the company for more than $1 billion.
-
Facebook hit 1 million registered users in December 2004, & a year later, users had expanded to about 6 million, allowing restriction placed on user registration to be lifted.
-
Previously, the Site was open to Harvard students before expanding to Columbia, Yale, Stanford, & other Ivy League & Boston-based schools.
-
In January 2007, the company launched its mobile Site, & by August 2011, the Facebook messenger platform was available for download for both Android & iOS devices.
-
Facebook went public with its initial public offering (IPO) on May 18, 2012, & its peak market capitalization rose to over $104 billion. Facebook’s IPO was one of the biggest & most anticipated IPOs in history, following Google’s IPO in 2004.
-
On September 14, 2012, Facebook reached 1 billion monthly active users which just goes to show the potential social media marketing companies are using to their advantage. At the time, the figure meant that one in seven people around the world were on the social network. Within the eight years that the Site was launched, it had 1.13 trillion “likes” and 219 billion photos uploaded.
-
In a bid to dominate social messaging on both phones & the Web, Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $21 billion. Facebook had earlier bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion.
For the infographic, click on the link below.