BARCELONA - Billionaire 29-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stars in the mobile industry’s biggest fair Monday, fresh from his $19 billion (14-billion-euro) takeover of smartphone messenger WhatsApp.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. AP FILE PHOTO
The keynote speaker on the opening day of the February 24-27 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Zuckerberg has come a considerable ways in the mobile world quickly.
When Facebook sold its shares to people in an initial public offering in-may 2012, “it literally had no mobile advertising revenues, ” said Eden Zoller, analyst at the investigation house Ovum.
“It did have quite a strong mobile user base at IPO but what it had did not do during those times was actually monetize those mobile users, ” she said.
During the time of the float, worries within the not enough money arriving from the mobile business sent Facebook’s shares sliding.
Nevertheless the myspace and facebook - boasting significantly more than - 2 billion members - quickly repaired its strategy.
By the conclusion of 2013, mobile phones accounted for 53 per cent of Facebook’s advertising revenue, getting $1. 2 billion within the last few quarter and much more than $3 billion within the whole year.
Nevertheless , mobile advertising may be “highly intrusive, ” Zoller cautioned, particularly when it interrupts an user’s engagement by having an application.
“You need to be cautious. ”
None the less, the myspace and facebook has to maintain the momentum, the analyst said.
“It can’t be complacent. On the mobile front it's specially crucial. Consumers have an ever-increasing quantity of social networking and social messaging alternatives to Facebook. ”
The organization still features a weak spot, nevertheless , she added: its failure to carve out a powerful position in mobile payment systems, which are required to exhibit strong growth next several years.
non-etheless, Facebook is obviously developing a base for further revenue growth.
On Wednesday, the myspace and facebook announced its takeover of WhatsApp, which followed last year’s smaller purchase of on the web photograph-sharing site Instagram.
Fifty per cent of a billion users on WhatsApp
“Facebook is investing in one of many fastest growing audiences ever - WhatsApp has become nearing fifty per cent of a billion users globally - and the monetisation potential that brings, ” said Guillermo Escofet of research house Informa.
Facebook has captured 18. 4 per cent of the mobile publicity market, which makes it the amount two force after Google, based on digital media analysts eMarketer.
“They performed an amazing turnaround from about couple of years ago, ” said Escofet, recalling the social network’s early reluctance to push advertising to mobile phones.
“The basis for that's simply because they failed to wish to compromise the consumer experience on mobile and so they failed to wish to cram the little mobile screen with advertisements, ” that he said.
Facebook’s solution was to integrate advertising in to its users’ news stream, where members see the latest events inside their “friends”‘ lives.
It has proven a simple yet effective strategy. Of Facebook’s - 23 billion users who're active one or more times monthly, three-quarters access your website from their smartphones.
Today, it's a “mobile company”, declared Sephi Shapira, leader of advertising platform MassiveImpact, a Facebook partner.
“We are extremely satisfied with them, ” that he said.
MassiveImpact’s customers publicize on Facebook but pay only each time an user clicks on the advertisement after which actually buys the item.
For products and services such as for instance insurance, the percentage of users who produce a purchase after hitting a web advertisement is usually in single digits, however for mobile apps that figure can rise to 20 or 30 %.
“For app promotion, I do believe they’re positively the most effective, ” Shapira said.
Many advertisers now devote each of their publicity to mobile phones, not really paying for Web advertising, that he said.
But “I think we have to perhaps not get too excited, ” Shapira cautioned.
“You need certainly to run simply to stay alive. So in forex trading, you need to constantly be innovating and developing new technologies simply to survive, in the event that you don’t, you disappear. ”
