Facebook looks unstoppable as it powers past 750 million users – will a flotation early next year turn it into a $100bn empire?
Job: founder, chief executive, Facebook
Age: 27
Industry: digital media
Staff: 2,000
Worth: $13.5bn
2010 ranking: 7
Status update: top of the MediaGuardian 100. It is only four years since Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook made its debut on this list – at number 100. "Social networks come and go – only time will tell if this latest example is fab or fad," we said of the site, which back then was trailing MySpace.
How times change. Today Zuckerberg's seven-year-old social media phenomenon is the world's busiest website. It is the UK's largest display advertising publisher (and responsible for one in four display ads in the US) with projected revenues for 2011 of $4bn – double the figure for 2010.
Zuckerberg's ambition was nothing less than to reconfigure the web through social navigation, enabling people to search via friends' recommendations rather than the results of a mystery algorithm. He is well on the way, said our panel.
With 750 million users Facebook is already the world's biggest photo website and a burgeoning platform for video, gaming and television – a key traffic driver for media owners, offering specifically targeted advertising and interaction. Our judges described it as an "immense media distribution platform" and the "number one media player" of the moment.
Named Time magazine's person of the year for 2010 – it said Facebook was the "connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet" – and the focus of the film The Social Network, Zuckerberg has been transformed from an awkward and unpromising geek into the world's richest and most famous twentysomething, listened to by world leaders.
The past 12 months have seen further rapid growth, although its popularity stalled in some of its biggest territories, including the UK and US. But more than half the UK's online population now using Facebook, it is a problem other media owners would love to have.
But if Zuckerberg is to his 1 billion global users target – he said it was "almost guaranteed" – then he is probably going to have to crack China. Good job Zuckerberg – a Harvard dropout who launched Facebook from his college dorm in 2004 – is learning Mandarin.
There have been serious blips too – ongoing concerns about privacy and revelations that it had hired a PR firm to smear Google, but none serious enough to topple him from the top of this year's list.
Facebook's latest feature is to integrate free video calls by teaming up with Skype. Personally introducing the service, Zuckerberg looked more self-assured than ever, evangelising about Facebook's domination of the wired world and with just a touch of humility about potential competition.
"The world generally believes that social software will be everywhere, and it will only be a matter of time before it reaches billions of people, whether through us or someone else," he said. "I'm not going to talk too much about Google. Lots of companies that have not traditionally looked at social networking apps will be trying apps. I view a lot of this as validation of how the next five years will play out – every app will be social.
"We just have to stay focused on building the best service for that. If we don't, someone else will."
Facebook is still a small company. It has only 2,000 staff compared with Google's 26,000, but is an increasingly attractive place for Silicon Valley's star developers. Its risky strategy of developing new features rapidly has always triggered blasts of protests from users, and the past 12 months has been no different.
Increasingly wealthy – with a personal if largely paper fortune estimated at $13.5bn – Zuckerberg has also had to continue to fend off lawsuits, though the Winklevoss twins have decided to drop their claim that he stole the idea for Facebook from them.
Zuckerberg, who has pledged to give the majority of wealth to charity, has defied criticism that his inexperience and introversion would prevent Facebook from realising its potential, instead proving his geek insight and business acumen.
Increasingly confident as a public speaker, and supported by a team of charming and extremely skilled executives that include chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg will remain the most influential figure in technology in a company that only ever looks onwards and upwards.
Just as we warned four years ago, however, the web is a fickle friend, and despite its ubiquity and undeniably visionary revenue plans, Facebook's position is precarious. It rests on keeping its technological edge, maintaining public interest in social networking and fulfilling the considerable promise of targeted advertising on which its financial future depends.
With a public offering expected early in 2012 – at a valuation that could be more than $100bn – Facebook has yet to put some serious money where its mouth is.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/24/mark-zuckerberg-mediaguardian-100-2011
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