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Facebook has been met with seemingly endless success since its birth in 2004. Projections for Facebook’s revenue are in the hundreds of millions. Since Facebook is still a privately owned company it does not report its annual earnings but revenues could be around $800 million for 2009 (1). When evaluating success however, there are more metrics to consider than simply revenue. The Christian Science Monitor reported in June of 2010 that Facebook had been declared “the most popular website in the world.” While such a thing could be subjective in nature, the newspaper noted that this commendation was unique because it was made by a ‘sometimes’ competitor. For one week in March, Facebook – the source of so much recent controversy in the wild world of the Web – “temporarily unseated Google as the most popular website in the U.S. Now, Google itself is admitting that Facebook is the most popular site in the world, ranking above second-place Yahoo, third-place Live.com – run by Microsoft – and fourth-place winner Wikipedia,” (2).
Facebook’s Successful CEO
Some of the biggest successes that Facebook has to its credit are not exclusively Facebook. In many ways it has been the long-term thinking, confidence, relentless attitude, non-compliant approach, and obsessive nature of Facebook’s CEO that has made the social media website what it is today (3,4). Jane Genova, writing for AOL, described four qualities of success that Mark Zuckerberg has and what many others want. Since being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year (5), Zuckerberg and his creation have got people wondering about what makes him successful. Ms. Genova listed these qualities: An outsider, blessed with the ability to understand an entity fully but still stand apart from it, alert, willing to grow (6).
Entrepreneurship Failures
With so much success over the years, it’s hard to image that Facebook has had much in the way of failure. Having said that, Facebook has not escaped lawsuits, public outcries, and disgruntled users. One of the biggest challenges for Facebook has been difficulty with Zuckerberg’s collaborators, when the company was still a start-up. Perhaps the most notable ‘failure’ involves a series of lawsuits from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. These twins that worked with Zuckerberg made numerous claims of theft concerning the idea for Facebook (7). In addition to claims of theft, many have expressed significant displeasure about some of Facebook’s privacy policies and design decisions. With a user base of over 600 million people, it is not surprising that Facebook experiences some negative feedback; Facebook has dealt with periods of “PR hell” (8) over the years. Dealing with accusations of “open disdain” for privacy and other customer service objections have not been uncommon in Facebook’s short life.
More Successes than Failures
Despite some of Facebook’s setbacks, it is clear that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have encountered significantly more success than failures. Facebook is innovating in areas that often do not have paths that are paved ahead of time. With so much success and so much change it is impressive that they have not experienced more ‘failures’, perhaps a credit to their success.
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