Steve Kaplan

Valleywag had an article today about Facebook recruiting CS Majors at MIT. From the piece:

"So, no sign of MySpace on campus this week. But the entire CS department job email list just got a recruiting email from Facebook. It's got a bunch of the same stats you already knew, but maybe some new ones too.

They mention, among other things, that that they plan to start doing "ad targeting, personalization, recommendation systems, and general data analysis." Hmm..."

The article goes on with the full text of the e-mail they sent out to the CS students...full of some bad-ass statistics.

• Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the US.
• The "engineering leverage ratio", which they define as "the number of page views the site gets every month divided by the number of engineers who build it", is 300 million per engineer (9 billion page views per month/30 engineers).
• They have about 7 million active users...if you do the math, with 9 billion page views per month, that is very sticky.
• Google gets about the same number of page views as Facebook.
• The Facebook photos service was created by a team of 2 guys but gets more traffic than Webshots, Yahoo Photos or Flickr - about 1 million uploads per day.

Not too much to add here but these guys came to CMU as well last fall and were recruiting our CS department. At the time, they had a 15-man engineering team which would make the "engineering leverage ratio" twice what it is now with 30 members. They also talked about the amount of page views they get - about as many as google but with only about 6 million active members at the time and claimed that they had one of the largest SQL farms in the world.

I'm a strong supporter of these guys. I love their site and use it regularly. Its like a rolodex that you never have to update. Unlike their competitors, Facebook knows how to implement their stuff elegantly and without too much crap or pretty interfaces like MySpace/LinkedIn (admittedly I use both of them as well :)).

What will be important moving forward, is building unique experiences to different user sets. Facebook now has access for high schoolers, college students and is adding corporate access. These are all different users with different needs and different amounts of disposable income.

A great example of this tiered merchandising is Manchester United. To have fans that remain for life, ManU has different ways that they market to kids, teenagers, 20/30 somethings and the higher end crowd. By doing this, they are able to answer the needs of different segments independently.

Facebook can have a lot of success with a tiered marketing approach. By getting users at a young age and delivering a valuable experience as they mature, they won't need to change over to new services when they move on from high-school->college->real world.

last updated 2 years ago comment