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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook shares tumble, company triples lobbying spending, expands bug bounty program and more on this week’s roundup

Posted: 27 Jul 2012 05:00 PM PDT

Facebook stock drops 11 percent – Facebook shares closed at $23.70 today, down significantly since the company’s second quarter earnings call on Thursday. The company met analysts’ expectations with $1.184 billion in revenue, but many investors are underwhelmed by the the social network’s ability to monetize its 955 million users, who are increasingly accessing the site from mobile devices.

Facebook triples spending on lobbying - Facebook spent $960,000 in lobbying from April to June of this year, up from $320,000 during the second quarter of 2011, according to The Hill. The company, which lobbies on issues related to privacy, online piracy and cybersecurity, among others, spent $650,000 in the first quarter of 2012. By comparison Google spent $3.9 million in the second quarter of this year, and more than $2 million during the same period in 2011.

Facebook expands bug bounty program – The company announced that it recently expanded its bug bounty program to better reward people who discover vulnerabilities that could compromise the integrity of Facebook user data, circumvent the privacy protections of Facebook user data or enable access to a system within Facebook’s infrastructure. The program had paid out $300,000 in bounty as of June. Ryan McGeehan, who manages Facebook's security-incident response unit, told Bloomberg, "If there's a million-dollar bug, we will pay it out," said. Information about the program is available here.

Facebook adds engineering team to London office – Facebook announced that it is hiring engineers for its London office. The company has a number of offices around the world, but only Menlo Park, New York and Seattle have engineering teams. According to a note from the Facebook Engineering page, “Our team in London will start small, focusing on building a core of great engineers, and then grow over time and eventually focus on building products in key areas like mobile and platform.”

Super Texas Holdem Poker, Temple Ruin, Tab Builder, Via.Me, more on this week’s emerging Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 27 Jul 2012 02:49 PM PDT

Soft Reklam’s canvas game Super Texas Holdem Poker led our list of emerging Facebook applications by monthly active users this week.

We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. This week’s top apps grew between 90,000 and 350,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain %
1.  Super Texas Holdem Poker 410,000 +350,000   + 583%
2.  Temple Ruin 659,404 +299,404   + 83%
3.  我的傳奇 780,000 +270,000   + 53%
4.  Oroscopo del Giorno v2.0 580,000 +180,000   + 45%
5.  Tab Builder: Like 770,000 +180,000   + 31%
6.  Hollywood Slots 680,000 +170,000   + 33%
7.  Armies of Magic 920,000 +150,000   + 19%
8.  Welcher Style passt zu Dir? 160,000 +140,000   + 700%
9.  Via.Me 750,000 +140,000   + 23%
10.  Lost Legacies 350,000 +130,000   + 59%
11.  Winner Super Slots 540,000 +130,000   + 32%
12.  Static FBML – HTML Estatico 580,000 +130,000   + 29%
13.  Daily Horoscope 690,000 +130,000   + 23%
14.  Static HTML… [Eleventh Tab] 920,000 +130,000   + 16%
15.  Keek 320,000 +120,000   + 60%
16.  Tab Builder: Basic Blue (3) 330,000 +110,000   + 50%
17.  Woobox Custom Tab | Arrow #4 750,000 +110,000   + 17%
18.  Panda Jam 990,000 +110,000   + 15%
19.  The Sims 3 470,000 +100,000   + 27%
20.  Telly 130,000 +90,000   + 225%

 

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Facebook average revenue per user was $1.28 in Q2, but still below Q4 2011 average

Posted: 27 Jul 2012 02:23 PM PDT

Facebook’s earned an average $1.28 revenue per user in the second quarter of 2012, a nearly 6 percent increase over last quarter, but not even a 2 percent gain year over year. The company’s highest ARPU was in Q4 2011 when it brought in $1.38 per user.

U.S. and Canada revenue per user was back up to its Q4 2011 average of $3.20, but Europe and Asia are still below where they had been. Facebook attributes this to poor economic conditions in Europe and rapid growth in Asia where it hasn’t begun to monetize as well.

As expected, revenue cannot keep pace with user growth as the social network expands in developing countries and other areas where the company’s advertising and payments business is still weak. Facebook experienced 29 percent year-over-year growth in monthly active users, bringing its total to 955 million MAU. Executives noted that Brazil and Japan were among some of the fastest growing regions. These could be much more profitable in the future, as Facebook is actively working to improve its sales and business relations there. For instance, the company is hiring a SMB growth specialist, Japan and a director of online sales and operations, South and Latin America. Facebook also held a version of its fMC marketing conference in Tokyo in March.

However, in India, Indonesia and many African countries, where a larger percentage of users are on feature phones — and sometimes not on desktop at all — monetization will happen more slowly.

The Weather Channel, Discovery Channel, Hallmark Channel, and more in this week’s top 10 gainers in TV network pages

Posted: 27 Jul 2012 12:28 PM PDT

The Weather Channel leads this week’s list of top gainers in the People Talking About This metric among TV Network pages.

The top 10 pages gaining People Talking About This saw increases between about 30,000 and over 110,000 engagements. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

# Name People Talking About Daily Growth Weekly Growth 
1   The Weather Channel 163,813 -7,113 +110,453
2   Discovery Channel 184,481 -657 +63,378
3   RTV NET 135,349 +1,852 +56,161
4   History 169,164 0 +52,360
5   Hallmark Channel USA 97,792 0 +48,160
6   TenSports 53,939 +9,116 +38,024
7   ABC News 73,542 0 +32,410
8   G4TV 236,073 0 +30,835
9   mbc 4 69,378 -1,720 +30,541
10   TV Guide Network 31,798 +146 +29,631

 

The Weather Channel more than doubled its PTAT (from 71,155 to 154,725) which could be from the post below which received 17,702 shares. The PTAT seems to be measured two days behind, which is why we see PTAT spike just after this post was made. New Likes and additional engagement means a large increase in PTAT, which the page is looking to maintain with its subsequent posts, publishing up to eight a day.

The page also publishes an additional story when multiple pictures are added to the Timeline, which works as an another way to engage fans and raise the PTAT of the page.

Another top gainers was the Hallmark Channel after it published a post claiming it would award $200 to one of its 845,000 fans. The post itself received over 25,000 likes. Promotions like this are actually against Facebook’s terms of service because it requires users to take a native Facebook action in order to enter. In this case, Liking the page post. All contests and sweepstakes on Facebook must be done through a third-party application. Sometime pages will receive a warning about violating promotion guidelines, other times they may be disabled. Sweepstakes like this may also violate state laws as well.

However, because of this post, the Hallmark Channel’s PTAT has continued to grow from 49k to 97k. It will be interesting to see how the Hallmark Channel might engage fans in the coming weeks without the promise of cash.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about pages among television Networks, as well as other categories.

Facebook says its social ad business has plenty of room to grow

Posted: 27 Jul 2012 11:38 AM PDT

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed Thursday that Sponsored Stories in News Feed generate about $1 million a day — half of which is coming from mobile placement — but COO Sheryl Sandberg said that these ads still make up only a small percentage of the site's inventory.

Facebook’s revenue from advertising was $992 million in Q2, a 28 percent increase from the same quarter last year, and up 13.8 percent from Q1. However, the overall number of ads delivered in the U.S. this quarter decreased 2 percent year-over-year as a result of users moving to mobile, and the price per ad decreased in Europe due to poor economic conditions in the area. The company says it is focused on making its ads more effective, demonstrating positive ROI and reaching the long tail of local advertisers in order to build its business.

Zuckerberg talked about the company’s belief in “social ads,” such as Sponsored Stories, which have shown early promise. Still, Sandberg says fewer than half of Facebook's ads are social and include some mention of a user's friend being connected to the advertiser. The other half of the ads are traditional display ads with a headline, body copy and image. These are small and off to the side of the page, and they don't perform very well. As Facebook makes more of its ads social and brings them in line with News Feed content, Sandberg says, they will have better clickthrough rates and be more valuable to advertisers.

A recent study by TBG Digital found that average clickthrough rate for traditional sidebar ads was less than 0.05 percent. Sponsored Stories in the sidebar have about 0.075 percent CTR, those in News Feed have 0.588 percent CTR and those on mobile have an average CTR of 1.14 percent.

Besides getting users to click their ads, advertisers want to know that these clicks are actually helping their business. Sandberg says Facebook is making progress measuring their ads' ability to generate sales. The company has independent ROI data from more than 60 campaigns that show 70 percent of campaigns on Facebook result in ROI of 3x or better, and 49 percent of campaigns showed 5x returns. Executives didn't mention it specifically on Thursday's call, but the social network introduced a new form of post-click and post-impression conversion tracking this quarter. This is in early stages and limited to Ads API partners for now, but it could become a key way advertisers understand the impact of their Facebook campaigns. This information is critical if Facebook wants to pull more ad dollars away from TV and other digital properties.

The third area Sandberg talked about as being a future source of growth was local business advertising. Brand advertisers have big budgets, but small business is the long tail that can be very profitable over time. Facebook made strides in this direction with its launch of Promoted Posts. These are basically advertisements that can be created and launched with a few clicks directly from a business' Timeline. Sandberg noted that Facebook has an advantage in that many small business owners are already familiar with the social network through their personal use. With business pages being so similar to personal profiles, it isn't much of a leap for people to get involved in promoting their business on the site. As Facebook makes it easier for business owners to connect with customers and run ads that work, the company can capture new revenue.

How the shift to mobile is hurting Facebook’s payments and ad revenues

Posted: 27 Jul 2012 09:13 AM PDT

More users are accessing Facebook from their phones than ever before, but during Thursday’s earnings call the company blamed a slowdown in both payments and ad sales on the shift to mobile.

Facebook’s revenues from payments increased by a scant 3.6 percent quarter-over-quarter, rising from $186 million in Q1 2012 to $192 million in Q2 2012, something CFO David Ebersman blamed on the shift to mobile gaming, and to platforms Facebook can’t monetize on. Facebook has tried to address the issue by developing its own HTML5-based mobile platform, but the technical issues surrounding HTML5 and poor discoverability in its platform have hampered its efforts.

In June game developer Wooga announced it would no longer distribute HTML5 games on Facebook, and was making its experimental HTML5 game Pocket Island open source. According to Wooga’s blog post, “installs were initially very low, as users struggled to find the game page… retention rates remained exceedingly low with around 5 percent of users returning to play the next day.”

It was a similar story with advertising. Revenues for Q2 were up 13.8 percent quarter-over-quarter to $992 million, but the total amount of ads Facebook delivered during the quarter actually declined.

“The overall number of ads delivered in the U.S. this quarter decreased two percent year-over-year despite a 10 percent increase in daily users and despite the increase in ads per page as daily web users in the U.S. declined in favor of mobile users, and we are seeing similar trends in other developed markets,” Ebersman said during the earnings call.

That shift is bad news for Facebook, as display advertising makes up the lion’s share of Facebook’s revenue stream, accounting for 83 percent of its total earnings in Q2.

During its second quarter earnings call, Facebook reported it now has 543 million monthly active users on mobile, an increase of 67 percent year-over-year and 11.2 percent quarter-over-quarter. Although the company did not reveal what percentage of its mobile users access the service through its iOS, Android and feature phone apps, we estimate there are about 95 million active feature phone users on the social network, based on analysis from the Facebook ad tool. In March, the company reported it had 83 million members who only accessed its site through its mobile apps or mobile website.

This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

lørdag den 28. juli 2012 at 07.38