2013-10-04

Sneak peak: Facebook's Q3 results

I'm a moderately active and engaged Facebook user (to my eternal shame), so in the run-up to the Facebook Q3 results later this month I thought I'd see what ads Facebook are offering me.

On desktop: zip. None. Nada. Niente. Wala. Nichts. Plenty of recommended pages, but nothing that looks like it would give anyone even a sniff of revenue. It took several reloads before I triggered a single sponsored link: "Online savings account" from GE Capital Bank. Not even remotely relevant. Note that now and again I click particularly irrelevant ads to hide them with appropriate feedback (irrelevant / duplicate / against my views etc) but this month FB seems to have run out of anything to show me.

On mobile: I scrolled down several days in my stream and there was nothing. No ads at all. So, this vaunted Facebook mobile advertising...

Facebook is currently priced at $51.07 a share, up from sub-$30 3 months ago. What. The Fuck? I wait with keen interest to see what they show this quarter in mobile revenue. Either they're making a heck of a lot from selling social graph information to clients for advertising elsewhere, or they're about to get their pants pulled down and rogered with the traditional curare-tipped iron fencepost.

2 comments:

  1. I only write relatively small websites for my wife but I do know about launching major and new products (Mobile networks) and if I were asking questions I would also want to know about what Alpha and Beta testing took place and why they didn't have a soft launch.

    If I had been the Project Director I would have been so attuned to the political fall out of this one that I would have ensured that the network and database were over spec'd and that the whole thing was tested to death, But I suspect that political pressure and meddling meant that they didn't have time or funds.

    PS I have a screen shot of the comments box all out of kilter when I resized it. If you have a somewhere I can sent it to let me know. It looks like there is a problem with a text area resize in the CSS and you need to disable horizontal resize, or both. http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_resize.asp. To try it yourself, in Firefox (I haven't tested the others) start writing a comment and then grab the little pointing area in the bottom left of the box and drag down and across.

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  2. Aha, thanks for the reproduction info - I see it now. I'll have a fumble in the CSS to see if I can persuade Blogger to do the right thing.

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