We all know Mr. Zuckerburg isn’t exactly short of a penny or two but with Facebook filing for its IPO yesterday, the sources of Facebook’s revenue were revealed.

Broken down into two categories the social media site explained that its revenue comes mainly from advertising and payments and other fees.

Both streams have been increasing dramatically over the past couple of years with advertising going from $764 million in 2009 to a massive $3.154 billion last year! Not to mention revenue from payments went from $106 million in 2012 to $557 million last year.

But the report didn’t only reveal Facebook’s success financially it also demonstrated that they’ve generated this revenue simply because their advertising is effective and is doing the trick for many businesses. For example Paramount did an advertising campaign on Facebook to promote their film, Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, which reached 65 million users in one single day. Now if that isn’t powerful advertising I don’t know what is!

The report also revealed how Facebook is constantly yet subtly updating its features to boost advertising opportunities for businesses. With the likes of their ‘check-in’ feature, a company can now pay Facebook to increase the prominence of that check-in within your friends’ news feeds. The social media site also confirmed that ‘sponsored stories’ or stories created by an advertiser have made their way from the limitations of the right hand side of the page onto people’s news feeds, again creating better opportunities for advertisers.

So if you want to benefit from the advertising opportunities of the web and social media platforms get in touch with Brash today and our digital marketing specialists will lead the way.