Facebook IPO Reveals Secrets

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By taking this road Facebook had to finally reveal a lot of information about the company and especially about their financial status.

Last year alone Facebook made $3.71 billion, out of wich almost $500 million came from Zynga, the undisputed king of online social gaming. (I wrote a while back exactly about Zynga and the huge profits made from this, see it here: Online Social Games – Billion Dollar Industry )

The rest of these money come mostly from advertising, so basically 85 percent of Facebook‘s revenues comes from selling our activity to other companies and such..

Facebook underlined though the importance of the social games, because more users lead to more page views that leads to more advertising money. So that’s how much you get out of using 845 million users for your personal benefit ;)

And that’s not all, around 483 million of them return to the site daily, they shared (posted) over 100 quadrillion (real number) bytes of photos and videos, and made around 2.7 billion Likes and comments a day only in the last 3 months of 2011. Just a bit mind blowing.. hmm?!  And imagine all of these in the end are used to increase Facebook’s treasury and allow Zuckerberg to fully enjoy his private jet.

Still last year (2011, for the confused or late readers) the highest payed employee of Facebook was Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer that earned over 3 million dollars. I guess most of that comes from taking crap from Zuckerberg all year long!

Another interesting disclosed document was a manifesto called “The Hacker Way“, a “unique culture and management approach” basically about focusing on creating and delivering features first and improving them later.

Zuckergerg wrote “We have the words Done is better than perfect painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping”.  ( Here’s the provided official Facebook IPO Filing document in case you want to browse through)

What this actually means is Facebook‘s way of telling the world that “shit will still happen“! As they do now, new features will crash, old features will crash, private data accidentally becomes public data, strange bugs might be encountered (see here: Facebook tracking user activity after log off )

And all of that does not mean they’re completely and utterly unprofessional and incompetent, it just mean they are using this new ground breaking and mind blowing revolutionary technique, called the hacker way!

Of course its more productive and way easier to just release features and half tested functionalities to see what happens instead of good planning and thoroughly testing, as a responsible software provider should.

But ah well, this is all just part of the true Facebook culture: with great power comes great irresponsibility.. ah and a couple of billion dollars!