When way less than one-sixth of humankind used Facebook
One of the original 10 Facebook employees shared this week a glimpse into the social media giant’s early years: a pitch deck sent to advertisers back when the company was called TheFaceBook.
The document, dated April 18, 2005, focuses on how the 14-month-old company TheFaceBook plans to advertise Starbucks DoubleShot. The pitch says they’ll target college students—only students with a “.edu” e-mail could use TheFaceBook then—whose profiles contained keywords like “coffee” or “snowboarding,” the roots of a strategy that’s the reason why Facebook’s ads are now so eerily personalized. There was also room for old-school banner ads.
The pitch also reminds us just how fast Facebook has grown during its 10-year history. The document reports only 1.9 million monthly unique visitors, while Facebook said as of Sept. 30, 2014 it has 1.35 billion monthly active users, which is about one-sixth of the world’s population.