John Battelle asked the question that all the industry craves to ask to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: how monetization is going?
But Mark kept answering about the growth of Facebook’s user base that doubled since the beginning of 2008 (from 50 millions to 125 millions), the focus of the company on keeping building better features that will allow users to share information online more easily, faster and from everywhere, and to do so he hired a lot of talented technical people, postponing the opening of sales offices to later. John insisted and finally Mark told us that the revenues are in the hundred of millions ballpark. He also confirmed that Facebook is not going public any time soon. John continued on numbers and asked iif Steve Ballmer was happy with his deal, asexpected Mark told us that Microsoft has been a great partner for his company, working specifically on the search with them and improving the advertsing experience, he gave an example of the new engagement ad offering that launched this summer. The day after the election the New York Time displayed an engagement ad around its headlines that people could pass around inside Facebook, and the response was huge in just one day. Asked about Connect, he confirmed that Facebook still does not want to join Open Social and stated that according developpers feedback the FB platform is better. The applications platform got also some improvement essentially by pushing the adoption of engaging applications and by decreasing the numbers of the ones that are just inactive boxes in profile pages. The conversation ended on the enterprise strategy and how Facebook tools will be ultimately used within the corporations