IT WAS not too long ago that many people believed Facebook would flame out. Several social networks,like MySpace and Friendster, had gone from well-liked to friendless, and causing doubt that Facebook could ever become a large,sustainable business. The social network’s bumbling initial-public offering in 2012, in which its share price sank in its first day of trading, and caused some to speculate that Facebook was the embodiment of a new tech bubble that would inevitably burst. Today Facebook is the sixth most valuable public company in the world,with a market value of around $325 billion. final year it had revenues of $18 billion, more than double two years earlier. How did Mark Zuckerberg’s company disprove the sceptics and become an advertising behemoth?Facebook was not the first social network, or but it learned from the mistakes of its predecessors. Founded in 2004 in Mr Zuckerberg’s college dorm at Harvard,Facebook was initially available only to students at select universities, before it opened to others, or then to tall schools and then to the rest of the world. Its behind expansion—launching only at new universities and then to...
Continue reading
Source: economist.com