– Facebook: It’s often pilloried for not making big money despite its huge reach, but Facebook already has a good business model — at least, that’s what Blake Chandlee, the site’s European commercial director, told the FT Digital Media and Broadcasting conference in London today. Chandlee said that in the US the site counts 75 of the top 100 advertisers among its customers and it works with 40 of the top 100 advertisers in Europe. Facebook’s growth is well-documented, but the pace of its global expansion across EMEA is quite staggering: a year ago 70 percent of its members came from the US, whereas now 70 percent of members come from outside the States and it has 600,000 app developers in 108 countries. But the growth is almost entirely organic — there is no operational push into these territories and the vast majority of the company’s 800 employees are based in California; Chandlee was the first employee outside the US.
— CPMs don’t matter: Despite Facebook’s huge metrics, its users upload 16 billion photos a month for example, Chandlee said it simply doesn’t matter how many people come to the site but what they do there: “It’s about how you get brands engaged with users — it’s not a CPM-driven model at all.” The advertisers Chandlee deals with want to know what value they will get from a relationship with a user not over the few weeks of a major campaign but over 18 to 24 months.
— Yahoo: Opening up digital infrastructure to allow users to build their own apps is a serious business for Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Europe: Kristof Fahey, president for strategic marketing, told the conference that a recent poll the company conducted of 1,000 people found that 200 had either already made or were planning to build their own app. And how does that make money? “Providing customers with what they want attracts them — and they are engaged users that are difficult to find and can be advertised to.”
— Microsoft: The panel’s chair, FT West Coast Managing Editor Richard Waters, wasted no time in asking Microsoft’s consumer and online VP for EMEA John Mangerlaars a rather searching question: with its on-going push into integrating social network features into existing MSN products, hadn’t MSFT missed out on the social networking boom? “Yes and no” was the answer — no, in that MSN is a major social media player with 150 million members worldwide and 170 million users of Windows Live Messenger, but yes in that the company failed to predict the current generation’s enthusiasm for broadcasting itself. “We thought that people would be more private, that keeping private options was the best plan,” admitted Mangerlaars. “But teenagers do not want more privacy.”
Comments have been disabled for this post