Facebook Hits 1 Billion Users, Releases Ad about Chairs

October 4, 2012 • Commentary • by

First thing’s first. Big news from Facebook this week: they hit 1 billion active monthly users. That’s huge. Enormous. More people log into Facebook each month than go to church on the weekends. This, nevertheless, failed to impress Wall Street, as it meant that growth had begun to trail off for the social networking behemoth.

In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show broadcast on Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked by co-anchor Matt Lauer how, with a billion users, the company wasn’t “killing it” by making money.

“It depends on your definition of ‘killing it.’ I mean, we are making billions of dollars,” Zuckerberg fired back.

In its last earnings report, Facebook said revenue increased by 32 percent to $1.18 billion in the second quarter. But that marked the slowest pace of quarterly revenue growth since the first quarter of 2011 – the earliest data available.

Across the board, Facebook has been receiving criticism of its management and business model, but particularly in terms of its weakening growth. As we covered (“Facebook Wants the World,” 9/24), Facebook is looking to tap into the market of those who lack dedicated computers. With mobile phone users at roughly 5 billion people worldwide, Facebook on Mobile is the source of the new push. Zuckerberg posted the following to his Facebook page (via mobile):

This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.

If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you.

Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.

I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

But in other news, Facebook today released its first commercial ad. And it’s somewhat bizarre, likening Facebook to chairs and doorbells (and airplanes and bridges and basketball and a country that I think is Austria). The takeaway is that Facebook is a convenience that we can hardly life without, but the ad ultimately recalls Clint Eastwood’s RNC speech. The most remarkable thing about the ad, though, is that nowhere in the commercial is a computer. Stranger yet, it features people reading newspapers.

Attribution

Reuters
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook post

Commentary Ticker

  • You Think You’re So Pretty: What Dove’s ‘Sketches’ Video Got Wrong
    May 23, 2013 | 5:02 pm

    “I should be more grateful of my natural beauty” one woman concludes after participating in the Dove Beauty Sketches. In fact, the woman, Florence concludes that natural beauty “couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.” Florence came to these undesirable conclusions through participation in a commercial released as part of Dove’s campaign to promote “real [...]

  • The Story of the Slurpee
    May 21, 2013 | 5:37 pm

    It might surprise you to hear that the Slurpee was an accident. Yet the beloved concoction, as a matter of fact, got its start when a Dairy Queen soda machine kept on malfunctioning. Its operator, Omar Knedlik of Kansas City, placed bottles of soda in his freezer as a failsafe. The bottles came out a [...]

  • We Are More Germ Than Human
    May 16, 2013 | 11:50 pm

    The human body is one of the most fascinating and puzzling ecosystems in the universe, a complex community of cells, germs and microbes that is still being mapped and decoded. Recent discoveries in this field have caused scientists to reevaluate the way we look at our internal functions, and perhaps we aren’t as much ourselves [...]

  • Daft Punk Streams New Album ‘Random Access Memories’
    May 13, 2013 | 1:42 pm

    The robots are back. The internet has been abuzz with hype for Daft Punk’s long awaited follow up to 2005′s Human After All, and today we finally get to hear it. While the official release date is still a week away, iTunes is offering fans the chance to stream all 13 tracks early. Simply follow [...]

  • The Bluths Return: Watch The First ‘Arrested Development’ Season 4 Trailer
    May 12, 2013 | 11:28 pm

    I’m afraid that I just blue myself. It’s the final countdown until the Bluth family is back and as dysfunctional as ever. The resurrected cult classic will return on May 26th for a fourth and final season released exclusively on Netflix. It’s been a long and painful time since the show was cancelled in 2006, [...]

  • RSSArchive for Commentary Ticker »

Trending on The Airspace