Facebook VP: “We want to be the next killer app in web advertising”
Rough times for Facebook. Despite the latest changes, the social network is being hammered (yet again) on privacy concerns.
If this media backlash will affect it´s user base and advertising business, is yet to be seen. But I´m sure Zuckerberg is not pleased with how things are going.
His appearance at D8 yesterday was a complete mess. Instead of being clearly apologetic for what Facebook is doing wrong, he insisted that sharing as much personal info as posible is a legitimate business model. They´ll keep on pushing people to share.
I recently had the chance of talking to Facebook VP of global sales, Mike Murphy, about this and other issues. We focused on FB business but privacy inevitably came up. And he was as evasive as Zuckerberg in most of the questions. An irony when Facebook philosofy is all about sharing.
The full interview, the first Murphy gives to a Spanish newspaper, was published today in EL PAÍS, along with a monographic about the social network.
Here´s an extract with some of the other topics we talked about:
Question: Is the privacy problem getting out of control?
Answer: User trust is what our business is built on. More user control exists on Facebook than any other website about what information is shared and not shared. But where we missed the mark is on the simplicity, so for a user to go on and know exactly what the decisions they are making within privacy mean, that´s the real important movement that we need to make.
Q: But the allegations published in The Wall Street Journal, about Facebook sharing personal data from users with advertisers, were pretty serious.
A: What happened in the past, happened in the past, and that´s something that we fixed. But the fact that we use explicit words that you use on Facebook to target ads against, versus implicit information about what you did type into a search box or other web pages, make what we do much more safe.
Q: You are a six-year old company with about $500 million in revenue. Google is a 12 year-old firm with almost $25 billion in revenues. Can you achieve that?
A: We´d love to, but we´ll see. 24 billion is a big number. I´m not skeptical, but it´s hard for me to predict the future.
Q: Are you confident that you´ll become a 1 billion dollar company this year?
A: We really don´t talk about the exact numbers. I feel good about the fact that we were EBITDA profitable for eight consecutive quarters, and I´m convinced that trend will continue.
Q: Are you finding it hard to monetize because most companies, especially large firms, still don´t get Facebook from an advertising perspective?
A: In the last 5 years of digital advertising, marketers have been trained to believe that the only thing they need to measure are impressions and clicks. We believe that the emotional connection that can be created on a Facebook page and our platform creates a real opportunity. So the better we are in providing tools to marketers like pages, analytics, drag-and-drop apps on their pages, tools to bring our functionality from Facebook onto their website, the more socially experience it becomes, and the more opportunity we have.
Q: Will Facebook go public soon?
A: I don´t expect that anytime soon. That´s something that Mark has been fairly vocal about.
Q: You recently closed a 5-year agreement with Zynga. Five more years of Mafia Wars, FarmVille… was that really necessary?
A: I think it is strategic for Facebook. It was a signal to the developers that we are interested in creating an environment for them to succeed. Companies like Zynga need to continue to come out with great interactive, engagement games.
Q: Do you see location becoming an important revenue source for Facebook?
A: We are focused on launching a location product. But our thought was that instead of us building out specific applications we are building a layer of location that allows developers to be able to build on apps. We haven´t been focused on how to monetize location or what it means for marketers.
Q: Google is moving into mobiles, TV, applications… do you want to be the new Google of web advertising in the next 2-3 years?
A: Our hope isn´t necessarily to be the next Google. But we want to be the next killer app in web advertising that provides the type of value that Google has been able to bring within the search platform.
Tags: Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Mike Murphy
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