Macam mana Mark Zuckerberg generate income melalui Facebook?

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Ada tak antara korang yg tertanya2 bagaimana Facebook boleh buat duit, walaupun ia adalah satu website yg percuma, nak daftar dan guna adalah free, tadak kena bayar apa2 kecuali bil internet tiap2 bulan?

How does Facebook Make Money
They say its free. They also say that Mark Zuckerberg – the guy who started
Facebook
– is one of the richest people around – a billionaire apparently. So how the hell does this guy give free accounts to its users and yet sit happily atop a goldmine? The figures going around about Facebook's annual revenue are heart-stopping to say the least. The numbers that did the rounds were all around the US$ 500 million mark, which means that since 2007, they've been more or less doubling their revenue. All this from a
free
website! So where is the money coming from? This article will answer the question, how does Facebook make money and solve the mystery for you.

How Facebook Makes Money?

Free account notwithstanding, Facebook
is
making money. And lots of it. How does Facebook make money? If only you knewhow does Facebook work
financially!

Ads
I'll solve the mystery for you in one simple word – ads. The same thing that runs most websites across the world. That is the big secret behind Facebook's burgeoning revenue. If you open your Facebook profile, you will see that the while right hand side of the page is full of ads. You can give the thumbs up to the ad or the thumbs down. The thumbs down will remove the ad and it will not come back.

How do these ads work? Well Facebook being a decidedly smart
social networking
institution knows which ad to put where. Like the
Google AdSense, Facebook too provides ad to the pages based on the interests and the overall profile of the user. So, if you mention in your profile that you are a fan of Nike or any other sportswear brand, the related ads will appear on the right hand side of the page for companies and websites selling them. Facebook ads are not intrusive and hence people do not get annoyed with them, unlike we do with those super-irritating pop-up ads.

And their advertising system makes sense, since it ensures that the right ad is displayed to the right customer, since the ads are selected for an individual page based on the interests and likes of the user. This avoids unnecessary waste of adspace on the page where the chances of the ad being 'hit' are theoretically pretty low. Also, the ad system of Facebook, gives the user a 'thumbs down' option, which ensures that the particular ad does not appear again. That too is a pretty interesting thought, given that the ad hasn't a chance of being clicked and letting it sit in front of the users will continue to rile them.

Facebook Gifts
Ever sent a virtual gift on someone's birthday? You must have at some point, if you knew
how to use Facebook. Well you do pay for some of them and a big slice of it goes into coffers of the company. While simply writing 'happy birthday' suffices for some, the 'send a gift tab' on your friend's wall encourages others to send a virtual gift – paid for online. All the money almost always goes to the company, but if the gift is provided by an outsider, then a portion of it goes there. But much of it is still retained by the website.

Application Performance
The beautiful thing about companies like these which work on different platform are the plethora of business ideas that they bring to the table. Performance advertising is a unique answer to how does Facebook make money. Let us take the example of Farmville, which is doing reasonably well on Facebook. Now the application is provided free for use for the users of Facebook and the parent company (Zynga) is getting a lot of traffic because of the game's popularity on Facebook. So isn't Facebook entitled to take a slice of that pie? After all, they are providing a platform for gaming companies like Zynga to their burgeoning user base. So Facebook makes a bit of money there too, as a 'rental' for using their users.

I guess that answers your questions about
what is Facebook and how does it work
and how does Facebook make money. Now this information on how Facebook makes money is largely speculative. Facebook is a privately held company and has the complete liberty to not disclose their financial details – and they don't disclose their revenues and the sources of their revenues either.

By Arjun Kulkarni Published: 6/24/2010

DanIno

Dari wiki

Most of Facebook's revenues comes from advertising. Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising,[51] and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory. According to comScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!.[52] In 2010, the security team began expanding its efforts to counter threats and terrorism from users.[53] On November 6, 2007, Facebook launched Facebook Beacon, which was an ultimately failed attempt to advertise to friends of users using the knowledge of what purchases friends made.
Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major websites. For banner advertisements, they have generally received one-fifth the number of clicks on Facebook compared to the Web as a whole.[54] This means that a smaller percentage of Facebook's users click on advertisements than many other large websites. For example, while Google users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of 8% of the time (80,000 clicks for every one million searches),[55] Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).[56]
Sarah Smith, who was Facebook's Online Sales Operations Manager, confirmed that successful advertising campaigns can have clickthrough rates as low as 0.05% to 0.04%, and that CTR for ads tend to fall within two weeks.[57] Competing social network MySpace's CTR, in comparison, is about 0.1%, 2.5 times better than Facebook's but still low compared to many other websites. Explanations for Facebook's low CTR include the fact that Facebook's users are more technologically savvy and therefore use ad blocking software to hide advertisements, the users are younger and therefore are better at ignoring advertising messages, and that on MySpace, users spend more time browsing through content while on Facebook, users spend their time communicating with friends and therefore have their attention diverted away from advertisements.[58]
Revenues
(estimated, in millions US$)
Year        Revenue        Growth
2006        $52[59]        —
2007        $150[60]        188%
2008        $280[61]        87%
2009        $800[3]        186%
2010[N 3]        $1,100[62]        38%
On pages for brands and products, however, some companies have reported CTR as high as 6.49% for Wall posts.[63] Involver, a social marketing platform, announced in July 2008 that it managed to attain a CTR of 0.7% on Facebook (over 10 times the typical CTR for Facebook ad campaigns) for its first client, Serena Software, managing to convert 1.1 million views into 8,000 visitors to their website.[64] A study found that for video advertisements on Facebook, over 40% of users who viewed the videos viewed the entire video, while the industry average was 25% for in-banner video ads.[65]
Facebook has over 1,700 employees, and offices in 12 countries.[66] Regarding Facebook ownership, Mark Zuckerberg owns 24% of the company, Accel Partners owns 10%, Dustin Moskovitz owns 6%, Digital Sky Technologies owns 5%, Eduardo Saverin owns 5%, Sean Parker owns 4%, Peter Thiel owns 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners own between 1 to 2% each, Microsoft owns 1.3%, Li Ka-shing owns 0.75%, the Interpublic Group owns less than 0.5%, a small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, California U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta, while Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company, and the remaining 30% or so are owned by employees, an undisclosed number of celebrities, and outside investors.[67] Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.[68]