Facebook: Untouchable, & in a League of Their Own

It is clear that Zuckerberg is Superman, and his Facebook is untouchable. In the midst of a downgraded, underrated, crawling economy, Facebook managed to double its revenues in the first half of this year with a staggering $1.6 billion, according to the Wall St. Journal. There was much talk about Facebook feeling the pressure from competitors, which was obviously completly unfounded. Although, at somepoint, Facebook may have to face external threats to its marketshare, but at the moment, they're in a league of their own. As market leader, having overtaken Myspace, leaving them in struggling to retain name recognition, Zuckerberg has successfully carved a permanent mark on the pop culture around the world.

In a Superman-esque feat, Zuckerberg’s Facebook platform saved the internet advertising industry. Although, it's safe to say social networking has revolutionized the online advertising, Facebook alone accounted for nearly 1/3rd of the internet display advertising impressions in June, which is more than Yahoo, Google, MicroSoft Corp and AOL combined. This illustrates the tremendous power of Facebook, and more importantly, the power of social networking as a whole. You don't have to be a marketing guru, or economist to see the impact social networking will have on allocation of advertising dollars in the not-so-distant future. But for now, it’s all about Facebook and the hundreds of millions of people, spending millions of minutes just "hanging out" on their page, or checking out their friend's pages.

The growing obsession has created global opportunities for advertisers, and businesses looking to market directly to their target in a personal environment - which (in the case of social network sites), is a captive audience.

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K Reilly
Cohn-Reilly Report