At least on paper, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now worth more personally than all of online services pioneer Yahoo. Here’s how the social networking company he co-founded some 8 years ago stacks up against other public technology and Internet firms at current market valuations.

Valued at $104.2 billion after setting its share price at $38 just yesterday, Facebook is currently worth:

- almost the same as Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Nokia, AOL, Adobe, Groupon and Research In Motion, combined (sum of market caps: $104.57 billion)

- a Netflix more than Amazon.com (market caps: $4 billion and $98,38 billion, respectively)

- nearly twice as much as ecommerce juggernaut eBay (market cap: $50.4 billion)

- almost 10 times as much as social network firm LinkedIn (market cap: $10.84 billion)

- more than half of Google (market cap: $203.13 billion). Google reported almost $3 billion in profits last quarter, Facebook booked $1 billion in net income for all of 2011.

- almost 43x what China’s social network RenRen is worth (market cap: $2.43 billion)

- approximately 4x what computer maker Dell is worth (market cap: 26.32 billion)

- more than 93 times what Zillow is worth (market cap: $1.12 billion)

Crazy when you look at it like that, right?

Needless to say, we’ll have to wait and see how investors value Facebook when its stock start trading publicly today (around 11 AM Eastern Time).

Either way, this offering will give Facebook a mind-blowing valuation, and will put enormous pressure on Zuckerberg and Facebook’s thousands of employees to make it worth much more than that in the coming years.

Love. It’s not always all you need.

In a sure-tell sign that Facebook’s IPO will be a massive failure, an Indian women has reportedly filed for divorce after her husband failed to update the relationship status on his social networking profile to ‘Married’ instead of ‘Single’.

The couple had been married for only two months, but the woman is already looking to nullify the – arranged – marriage over her husband’s Facebook gaffe.

For his part, the man claims he simply forgot to update his status because he was so busy with family and his furniture business post-wedding.

You may think that this is funny, but it’s actually quite hilarious.

Reports the Deccan Chronicle (via 9MSN):

Pallavi (name changed), 28, a newly-wed IT professional, has approached the family court seeking divorce from her 31-year-old businessman husband Gaurav (name changed), for not updating his Facebook profile status from “single” to “married”!

The Telugu couple had an arranged marriage just two months ago. The case was filed in the jurisdiction of an Aurangabad court where the girl resides. Gaurav told the court that he had forgotten to update his status.

However, Pallavi said she couldn’t trust her husband and wanted to nullify the marriage. The judge has given the two parties six months to undergo counselling.

Can’t they just poke and make up?

The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that they have reached the 7,000-comment threshold on a Facebook privacy proposal, first raised last week, which would force the company to take the revisions to a worldwide vote. Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy and how it is approached by Facebook.

Specifically, if you go to Facebook’s English-language Data Use Policy page where it has detailed the new proposals, there are now over 9,000 comments on the post. The proposal, you can see, has some XXX’s at the top: that’s because it is due to close this evening, at 5pm Pacific Time (yes, more business as usual at Facebook, despite the fact that it also happens to be going through the biggest IPO ever in tech history).

The signatures are potentially a milestone moment in a campaign that began about a year ago, when the activist group filed 22 complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (Facebook’s international HQ is in Ireland). Those complaints in part led to the DPC issuing a report in December with some suggested changes to its privacy policy — largely aimed at making it more transparent and for users to be able to more clearly access all their data and delete it if they choose — but the activists believe that the changes in fact “worsened many issues and did not comply with the Irish conditions.” The Irish DPC and its German counterpart, the German Data Protection Agency, have put in more suggestions for changes since then.

Europe-v-facebook.org has been trying to drum up support for its campaign and says that after an appearance on a German TV show “Stern TV,” it resulted in a wave of responses — 30,000 on the German version of the privacy proposal page, and over 7,000 on the English page (although if you look at that page you can see that there are a lot of German comments there, too).

What happens next? It’s an unprecedented situation but Facebook says in its own “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” that it will take any proposed changes to its wider user base, currently at 901 million active users, for a vote, and if 30 percent of them vote in favor or against, their decision will be binding:

If more than 7,000 users comment on the proposed change, we will also give you the opportunity to participate in a vote in which you will be provided alternatives. The vote shall be binding on us if more than 30% of all active registered users as of the date of the notice vote.

It’s been a hot topic, but it’s anyone’s guess whether 300 million people will actually make the effort to weigh in on privacy. And according to europe-v-facebook.org, Facebook is still looking at the comments to decide whether they are applicable to this rule. Indeed, there’s scope for duplicates and fake comments, so that is one vetting that will likely be done first.

We have also reached out to Facebook ourselves for a comment and will update this as we learn more.

Facebook knows what’s best for you, sometimes before you do. That’s the meaning of a new “Likers Gonna Like” inspirational mini-poster printed by the Facebook Toronto Office. If you don’t approve of something Facebook’s doing, fine, there’s millions of other people who do. And just as with the launch of the news feed, if you hate some change to the Facebook interface, wait a few months, and you’ll probably end up Liking it too.

It’s a cavalier statement, one based on several old hip-hop songs including “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, where he raps “If [they] hate then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up”. It’s a mentality that has gotten the company into privacy trouble. But the idea that Facebook and its visionary CEO Mark Zuckerberg should push forward with bold ideas because “Likers Gonna Like” is what’s let Facebook move faster than its older rivals, and kept it from being disrupted these last eight years.

The poster wasn’t officially produced by Facebook Analog Research Laboratory, which made the company’s famous “Stay Focused & Keep Shipping” and “Move Fast Break Things” posters. It’s a 8.5 x 11 inch printout, according to Sachin Monga of Facebook’s Toronto platform strategy team who snapped the photo above. But it’s still being widely Liked and shared by employees, showing the words resonate with them as they watch Facebook IPO later this morning.

Facebook’s mission is “making the world more open and connected”. Sometimes that means making people uncomfortable at first. You don’t have to agree with how Mark Zuckerberg does things, and you can hate if you want to. But remember, Facebook’s just the messenger. The message is the future.

With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 Securities, is seizing the moment to boost its own profile by offering customers US$200 of Facebook shares if they sign up to trade on 8 Securities’ trading platform in the next month.

The offer indirectly serves a couple of other purposes, too: it gives non-U.S. citizens a relatively easy crack at a bit of stock in the most valuable tech IPO ever, and it raises Facebook’s Asia profile even further as people continue to wonder how Facebook might finally address one of the biggest markets in the world, China.

Mikaal Abdulla, the CEO of 8 Securities (a TC Disrupt Beijing Finalist in October 2011), says it will work like this: An individual opens an investing account for 8 Securities’ trading platform, for a minimum of HK$10,000 ($1,290). His company will then purchase Facebook stock on the open market and deposit directly into that customer’s account. “Once a customer’s account is opened, we will purchase the stock on a rolling and daily basis. The customer need not worry as we will always purchase at least $200 USD of stock and round up for them.”

Making U.S. stocks more accessible to non-U.S. investors, specifically in Asia, is what 8 Securities is about: ”Until now, access to the US stock market has not been widely accessible to individual investors across Asia,” Abdulla said in the release announcing the offer. “Old technology, high pricing and poor local customer service has made US trading difficult for investors.” The company offers 15,000 U.S.- and Hong Kong-listed stocks from a single account and charges a US$8.88 flat fee per U.S. trade with no other fees.

Abdulla tells me that the most active stocks so far on its platform have been Apple, Google and Sina. “I am certain Facebook will take the top spot today,” he says. The company will be running the Facebook promotion for the next month, starting today.

8 Securities, founded by ex-E*TRADE employees, has only been live for the last three weeks, so this will be a profile-raising exercise for the company, which otherwise says it promotes itself exclusively via social and online in Asia. Before launch, 8 Securities had raised $8 million from VCs Velocity Capital in the Netherlands and Full Global in Hong Kong. On the back of “very strong” early results — Abdulla notes that Alexa data puts 8 Securities already as the most-visited brokerage in Hong Kong (there are over 150 there) — the pair of VCs have just invested an additional round of $1.5 million in the company, Abdulla tells me. He says the top geographies for account opening is Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Singapore.

The funding will be used to expand the company’s operations further in Asia, specifically Mainland China and Japan, he says. Not a precursor, necessarily, to Facebook itself expanding in these markets, but definitely one way its profile will rise.

In its latest S-1, Facebook noted that it had 230 million monthly active users in Asia. It notes that in countries like Japan and South Korea it has less than 15 percent of the market.

Perhaps more significantly, it has no official market share in the biggest market of all, China, where it is banned from official use — although there have been workarounds created using private networks. Some speculate that when Facebook finally does something in China it might be via an acquisition rather than an organic operation. Among the local social networks, RenRen currently has a market valuation of $2.4 billion and Tencent has one of $54.3 billion, and some believe that could make RenRen a target.

Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at ‘Hacker Square’ at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters this evening ahead of the company’s insanely-hyped initial public offering. Now, some of the first photos are starting to trickle in. There was a standing ovation for chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a talk before several long-time engineers bounced in while wearing capes or bringing boomboxes.

Tonight Facebook is having its 31st Hackathon to celebrate the IPO. Hackathons are a company tradition. They’re a place where engineers and other non-technical employees get to stay out all night building concepts into real products that sometimes eventually get shipped. Some of the big products that have come out of earlier Hackathons include Facebook chat and an early version of Timeline.

The company got its employees together around a big yellow crane that’s in the center of their ‘Hacker Square.’ The crane came from their old Palo Alto headquarters where it was originally put in by Agilent Technologies (the company that spun out of Hewlett Packard, which is arguably, the company that made Silicon Valley more than 70 years ago).

Here are some of the photos that have come in so far! The best photos are actually from Facebook product designer Francis Luu. But because we are trying not to be super lame, like various slideshow-addicted blogs that shall not be named, here is the link to his photo album. There are also photo albums from other Facebook employees Brian Zeitler, Jasper Hauser and Chris Kalani here.

If you are a Facebook employee and are not living in ungodly fear of having your RSUs, options, etc. revoked on this special day, feel free to send us more photos at tips@techcrunch.com. 

Here’s the crowd that gathered before Zuckerberg’s talk:

Here’s a photo that YouTube’s Hunter Walk posted of the standing ovation for Zuckerberg:

Here’s the set-up before the event started in a photo from Blake Ross, a director who was brought in through Facebook’s very first acquisition:

Here’s the commemorative T-shirt for the Hackathon:

More people hacking:

Facebook revealed that it is seeing in its impending IPO with one final hackathon as a private company, and things are already under way at Menlo Park.

The listing is set to be the biggest Internet IPO ever – which will value the company at an initial $104 billion — and Zuckerberg will ring the bell in from a stage that has been constructed for the event. Thousands of employees attended, initially, giving their CEO and company founder a standing ovation.

The images come courtesy of Facebook staffer Francis Luu. We’ve put a few of the most interesting shots below, but you can go check them out in full here, you know where…

Standing room only:

‘Executive hoodies’ are particularly popular:

Zuck gets a standing ovation, ahead of ringing the bell in remotely via Facebook HQ on Friday morning:

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

Tomorrow Facebook will sell shares in one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. New investors will gobble up the stock to get a piece of the global phenomenon famously started in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in 2004. But while owning the stock will have quantifiable value when it trades on the open market, few buyers will be able to say truthfully that they understood the value of the company just a few years ago.

Ask yourself candidly, what did you think of Facebook the first time you landed on its homepage? Where you blown away? Could you see how it would fill a gaping need in the lives of nearly a billion people? If you’re honest with yourself, and you’re not Peter Thiel, your answer is probably, “No, not really.”

Don’t feel bad. Like many of the astoundingly successful web companies of the last decade, it was hard to appreciate the value of Facebook at first glance. But one person who “got Facebook” early on was Noah Kagan, who in October of 2005 joined the company as one of its first product managers. In 2006, Noah was the source for an analysis of Facebook written by Nisan Gabbay. The essay identified one of the most important reasons for the company’s ascent to Internet glory and offers a prescient description of opportunities still to come:

“The Facebook success story is most interesting to me because of how daily offline social behavior drove usage of the site. There are plenty of activities in our daily life that could benefit from a complementary online product … Facebook demonstrates you have a great Internet service if offline behaviors can drive nearly daily usage online.”

The analysis was spot on. Facebook succeeded because it built new online habits around frequent offline behaviors. Originally, Facebook was designed to replace the physical face books undergraduates received their first week of school. The printed collection of classmates’ names and photographs was an indispensable artifact of college life and was referenced for everything from study group formation to late-night hookups.

TheFacebook.com, as it was originally known, offered users a digital way to feel connected to others throughout the day and from anywhere they could access the web. The power of this universal human need for social acceptance and connection helps explain how the company grew well beyond college campuses and now touches one in eight people on the planet.

The Need To Feel

Ask a devoted Facebook user why they log-in to the site several times per day and they’ll describe features they love and provide examples of how they use the service. They’ll tell you it’s a great way to share photos or keep up with their friends.

But below the surface is the need for emotional gratification. Though we can all shift our emotional states ourselves, it’s not easy. Instead of going through the hard work of consciously changing the way we feel, we use ready-made solutions to do it for us.

Using products or services for emotional gratification is nothing new; some of the most valued things on earth are those that have the ability to transport us quickly from pain to pleasure. For example, we laud the ability of painters or musicians to “move us” with their art. We shower athletes with millions for their ability to transform the gloomy start of the workweek into the excitement of Monday Night Football. Facebook, and the companies like it, are the new tools we use to quickly elevate our moods. This “emotion arbitrage” is the differential in work between having to create our desired physiological state ourselves versus utilizing a product or service to help do it for us.

Facebook won’t be the last company to help us feel good fast. The next web phenom to fulfill our emotional needs will likely contain the following traits:

Cued By Frequent Feelings

The most successful consumer web companies cater to our most basic and powerful emotions. People may feel emotions differently, but we all feel the same spectrum in varying degrees. The most valuable services create internal triggers in the user, activating desire to use the site whenever experiencing a particular sensation. These cues prompt users to come back to the site unaided by external messages. The site becomes the default solution to satiate their emotional needs.

The key is how often we feel the emotional cue. In fact, the market potential for a new company is a function of the frequency of how often the emotion it addresses is felt. As Gabbay correctly noted in his 2006 article, early Facebook users felt the need to connect to the site on a daily basis. Likewise, companies that successfully address frequently experienced emotions stand to reap huge rewards.

Pain Relief

When we feel negative emotions we seek out experiences to bring us back to more positive mental states. Products that can alleviate powerful negative feelings – like fear, sadness, rejection, anxiousness, inferiority, and uncertainty – even temporarily, can be a major draw for consumers.

Odds are that if you’ve felt restless during your day, you’ve visited Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or one of the other top 25 websites to lift you out of your funk. However, positive feelings fade over time, and when we find ourselves in a negative emotional state again, the cycle continues. The chemistry of the brain ensures this is so.

With Facebook, it’s often loneliness that cues a visit to the site. Twitter is cued when the user fears being out of the loop about what’s happening. Pinterest users feel the urge to capture and collect visual scraps of the web, worried they’ll lose the image lest they pin it.

Specific Solutions To Fuzzy Needs

You may be thinking that to claim websites are used to satiate unpleasant emotions is a stretch. Clearly, no one logs into Facebook after saying, “I’m seeking to be taken out of a state of loneliness. Let’s check my timeline!” Yet, it’s undeniable that the mind compels us to do everything we do as it endlessly searches for rewards and avoids pain.

So how does a consumer technology company communicate what their product is for, without actually stating what the product is for? Obviously, no one would have signed-up for Twitter with the tagline, “Twitter alleviates your anxiety of social rejection.” Instead, the company made the value of the service concrete with the tagline, “Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”

Yet, in Twitter’s early days even this messaging was still too opaque. So Twitter had to be even more specific about the value of the service. As Josh Elman, an early product manager who led the Growth Team at Twitter, explained to me, “We had to more actively tell the story and came up with use cases around knowing what was happening. One great example is when Conan O’Brien tweeted he was going on tour and sold it out quickly. We told the story as, ‘if you are a fan of Conan O’Brian and were on Twitter the morning of Thursday, March 11, you may have seen the tweet announcing his tour and quickly bought tickets. If you weren’t checking Twitter then, you missed out.’” Same message delivered, but with a specific example to drive the point home.

Things To Come

With the imminent Facebook IPO, Instagram’s recent billion dollar sale, and unprecedented new sources of capital funding seed-stage investments, a new tide of entrepreneurs will answer the enticing call of opportunity and pursue their Silicon Valley dreams. Though almost all will fail, a tiny few will create products, which will touch the lives of not just millions, but billions of people. Those entrepreneurs will have a firm understanding of human behavior and their products will be grounded in fundamental emotional needs.

If there’s something on Facebook that won’t stop pinging you with Notifications, tell it to shut up instantly with Facebook’s new granular, in-line notification controls. Hover over an alert in the Facebook.com homepage’s globe icon drop-down and click the ‘x’ for the option to turn off notifications from that app, group, event, or post you commented on. The whole drop-down has a slick new look, and you can scroll down to much older notifications too.

Previously you had to dig your way to the dedicated Notifications Settings page to make these changes, and there was no way to turn off a specific source of alerts — you had to silence all your events or all your posts. Facebook has confirmed with me that most of the changes to notifications will be rolled out to everyone by tonight, except for app alert controls which are still in testing.

As we accumulate more friends and apps, Facebook’s notifications can turn from delightful pointers to annoying distractions that interrupt our lives. These new controls mean if you want a more zen Facebook experience, you can make it so.

[BranchOut just happened to be the first app I saw in the updated notifications drop-down. Its inclusion in the screenshot is not a reflection of the quality of the app.]

Now that some of us have been on Facebook for eight years, Facebook needs to be mindful of exhausting its most active users. These are the people uploading the photos, starting the groups, and throwing the events that engage everyone else that uses the social network more casually. It’s already moving in the right direction by offering notification summaries instead of individual emails

If power users become even a bit annoyed with how often Facebook alerts them to minor occurrences, and they don’t feel like they have tight control, they could drift away and stop generating as much content. That could have a ripple effect on overall time-on-site and engagement that could hurt Facebook’s ad business.

The new controls should be especially helpful for quieting noisy groups. One minute someone adds you to a group without your consent, and the next minute you’re getting dozens of notifications about weird music genres or lame club nights. Facebook recently made it much easier to find notification controls on group pages, but now you don’t even have to visit to shut off these alerts.

[Update: Facebook tells me "The intent behind the change is to modernize the UI and add some features which will help users more easily consume and curate their notifications."]

With the IPO tomorrow, it’s good to see Facebook launching new features today. It seems it’s really serious about the message plastered all over its headquarters. “Stay Focused & Keep Shipping”, even if you’re about to be a paper millionaire. And now it’s got a new poster for all the haters who are gonna hate on its new-found riches…

Facebook’s $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April.

That’s a nice little bump, but the deal hasn’t gone through given regulatory reviews. On top of that, we don’t know the restrictions on the shares like when they vest or if they’re subject to a lock-up period. Plus, shares may pop tomorrow and their value will probably fluctuate a lot by the time six-month lock-up date hits. When Facebook agreed to buy Instagram, it said it would pay with $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of stock. That stock is now worth nearly $874 million, creating a $1.17 billion price tag.

Originally, Facebook said the deal was going to close by the end of June, according to its IPO filing. But now it appears that it may take longer because of a more thorough FTC investigation. There’s a requisite investigation if a deal is more than $66 million. But because of the more than $1 billion price that Facebook paid and the reach of both companies, the commission is said to be looking a little bit more closely at the deal, a source with knowledge of the talks tells us. The FTC usually doesn’t publicly confirm investigations until they’re over, and hasn’t publicly confirmed if they’re doing one on this deal.

But there is evidence that it’s taking longer than expected. Facebook changed its IPO filing earlier this month by amending a sentence projecting a second quarter close for the Instagram deal. It now forecasts a close sometime by the end of the year. If the government blocks the deal, Facebook has agreed to pay Instagram a $200 million kill fee, according to its IPO filing.

Because of this, Instagram’s dozen or so employees haven’t even started at Facebook. They’re still in limbo and they’re working from their San Francisco headquarters on the app, instead of Facebook’s Menlo Park office. Meanwhile, Facebook is also trying to improve its own mobile offerings; it recently boosted the size of photographs in the mobile news feed, making the overall experience more Instagram-like.

While the deal is ultimately expected to go through, a Facebook-Instagram acquisition poses several challenges for the FTC. For one, the FTC’s merger guidelines happen to focus a lot on pricing power, and how a merger would affect a company’s ability to raise prices and decrease output. But both Facebook and Instagram give their products away for free.

The other components of the FTC and Department of Justice’s guidelines have to do with market share. They’ll add up the square of different market shares for competing firms, creating a number called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. If it’s above 2500, then the market is highly concentrated. If it’s below 1500, then it’s unconcentrated.

But again, it’s not clear how this applies in a market where companies can rise and fall so quickly. Instagram basically appeared out of nowhere. It racked up nearly 40 million users in about 18 months. Plus, the time it takes for any given company to gain millions of daily active users is declining, partly because of the virality of the Facebook platform itself and then because the iOS and Android platforms are finally reaching scale.

So how do you apply a formula like this when changes in market share are so dynamic? The last time the FTC took a close look at a consumer web deal of this size, it was back in 2009 with the $750 million Google-Admob acquisition. The commission unanimously closed it after Apple entered the competitive field with its acquisition of rival mobile ad network Quattro, which became iAd. However, there hasn’t been a smartphone app deal of comparable size to Instagram — yet.

Facebook is testing a new design for its self-serve ad tool that presents users with a list of pages, apps and other potential ad destinations they’re connected to.

The social network has been experimenting with designs and features of its ad tool in order to make it more intuitive and useful for less experienced advertisers. Although Facebook introduced a number of new options for large advertisers earlier this year, the company also seems to be trying to do more to support the small- to medium-sized businesses who want to advertise on the site.

The latest design, seen above, includes icons and names of all the Facebook objects for which a user has admin privileges. There is also a new “Getting Started” sidebar module with sample ad destinations. Previously, this first step simply included an empty search box called “Destination,” as seen below. The new design is likely to help users find what they want to advertise more quickly. From there, the tool works basically the same as we covered in our walkthrough here. Overall, the tool presents Facebook advertising in easier-to-understand terms and simplifies the steps to starting a new campaign.

 

Editor’s note: Peter Vogel is co-founder of Plink, a Facebook Credits-based loyalty program that rewards Facebook members for dining and making purchases at their favorite restaurants and stores. Reach him via email at peter@plink.com or follow him on Twitter @pvogel.

Although introduced in 2009, we’ve only seen glimpses of what Facebook Credits will become when it grows up, and Facebook is about to kick off the training wheels.

So far, Facebook has done little to promote the virtual currency of Facebook Credits and it’s been used almost entirely in social gaming. But even with this limited exposure and promotion, Facebook Credits’ fees already represents $557 Million in revenue or 15 percent of Facebook’s entire 2011 revenue. Even more remarkable is that less than two percent of Facebook users bought virtual goods with Facebook Credits in 2011, yet it still represented 15 percent of Facebook’s revenue, primarily from just one vertical – social gaming. One vertical and two percent of members represented 15 percent of Facebook’s 2011 revenue!

Why hasn’t Facebook promoted the Credits Economy more aggressively? 

Some believe that Facebook has waited to promote Credits as a Facebook-wide currency until after the IPO; a valuation based on advertising revenue is less volatile and less likely to attract concern from investors.

A second theory is that Facebook tends to introduce features slowly and let them develop; even though Facebook’s App Platform was opened in 2007 and hundreds of millions of members were playing games, Facebook did little to monetize the platform until they required game developers to use Facebook to process payments on July 1, 2011, about four years later.

Now, about three-and-a-half years after Facebook Credits were launched, Facebook is ready and they’re going to need the revenue to satisfy shareholder expectations.

What will change after the IPO?

It certainly looks like, post-IPO, Facebook will begin promoting Facebook Credits heavily and will soon be making Credits easier for consumers to use and more profitable for developers.

On the consumer front, we’re predicting that a user’s Facebook Credits balance will be more prominently displayed (still privately) on their profile. Currently it’s hidden a few clicks deep under Home>Account Setting>Payments.  Facebook will also start featuring a list of places where members can spend Credits. Facebook’s new App Center is a great start for this, increasing the ease with which users can find new apps – not just games – some  for free, some for purchase with Credits. Facebook could also feature a new category under “Favorites,” listing recommended ways to spend Credits based on that specific member’s interests, friends, etc.

In addition, Facebook will likely run more promotions offering consumers Credits at a discount, “Buy  $1 in Credits and get $2-3 dollars worth of Credits for free.” This is similar to promotions Facebook ran in games just few months ago, but Facebook will use the same strategy outside of games to attract a wider audience.

Developers will also benefit from all the promotion that makes Credits easier to use for consumers, but for most developers, increased discoverability is key. No matter how great an app or game they build, if a consumer can’t find it, everyone loses. For the Facebook credits economy to flourish, discoverability is essential; increased listings, rankings, categories and a well organized App Center is key and Facebook is already on their way to providing developers with these features.

Facebook has also hinted, with little explanation, that in certain verticals outside of gaming, Facebook will consider lowering the 30 percent tax they typically keep on Credit transactions. This may open the door for Open Graph participants like Netflix, Spotify and the Washington Post, to name a few, to begin accepting Credits for monthly subscription plans, created just for Facebook. Since these partners and more than 50 others and counting are all integrated into Facebook’s Open Graph, already with the ability to share “like’s” “listening to,” and “watching,” the next logical step is to begin accepting Credits as payment. By lowering the 30 percent fee it is now financially possible for these partners to participate in the Facebook economy.

What does all this mean for the Facebook Credits Economy?

I’ve predicted and still believe the revenue generated from Facebook Credits will double every year for the next five year, eclipsing the revenue generated by advertising by 2016.

Credits will emerge from gaming this year and be used Facebook-wide for all sorts of paid apps ranging from dating to entertainment (TV, movies, music and live streaming of pay-per-view events) to more functional utility apps you might be used to buying for your smart-phone.

Facebook Credits is about to grow up fast.

Social gaming was its birth, the new App Center is its first step … and we’re all waiting to hear its first few words. I’m guessing it will be some version of, “Pay… here… always.”

Facebook posted new jobs for head of policy in Japan and Korea this week. There was also a data center position, marketing and recruiting jobs posted on Facebook’s Careers page. The company’s LinkedIn feed posted an engineering and a few recruiting positions.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Head Of Policy Japan
• Head Of Policy Korea
• Data Center Network Technician (Virginia)
• Manager, Business Operations Data Analytics
• Manager, Corporate FP&A
• Manager, Global Marketing Business Operations
• Manager, Mobile Partnerships (Tokyo)
• Design Recruiter
• Design Recruiter – Contract
• HR Specialist EMEA – Contract (Dublin)
• Creative Strategist (New York)
• Product Analyst
• Analyst, Global Sales Reporting (Hyderabad)
• Analyst, Ad Review Operations – Contractor (Austin)
• Account Manager (Sao Paulo)
• Quantitative Researcher
• People Services Rep – Contract
• Technical Recruiter -Contract (Seattle)
• University Recruiting Coordinator – Contract
• Strategic Partner Manager, Gaming (Seoul)
• Associate, Custom Market Insights (New York)
• Associate, Business Operations
• IT Manager

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Data Engineer, Enterprise BI
• Technology Partner, Supply Chain/Logistics
• IT & Security
• Head of Technical Recruiting
• Manager, User Operations (Dublin)
• Team Lead, User Operations (Dublin)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook hired engineers and marketers this week, according to its LinkedIn feed and Careers page. The company also appeared to hire a manager of State and Local Public Policy – California and legal counsel in its India office.

As we covered Tuesday, the company also hired the team behind Android photo sharing app Lightbox.

New hires per LinkedIn and other sources:

• Alex Bakhturin, Software Engineer – former software engineer at DoubleGIS.
• Steven Kim, Software Engineer – former software developer at Microsoft.
• Ali Amin, System’s Tech Engineer – former mobile test engineer at TeleCommunication Systems.
• Matias Castello, Platform Partnerships – former analyst in venture capital at DN Capital.
• Ray Tong, Decision Support Analyst – former information systems intern at IMAX.
• Glenn Davis, Strategist, Global Marketing Solutions – former manager of society and technology research at Mercedes-Benz.

Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:

• Manager, State and Local Public Policy, California
• Legal Counsel (Hyderabad)
• Data Engineer, Enterprise BI
• User Interface Engineer, Marketing
• Manager Infrastructure Engineering 120401
• Keynote Presentation Designer
• Senior Analyst, Custom Market Insights (New York)
• Research Manager
• Learning and Development Consultant (Hyderabad)
• IT Field Support Manager (Dublin)
• Head of Creative, B2B Marketing
• Head of Retail, Global Vertical Marketing
• Platform Product Marketing Manager
• Partner Engineer, Marketing Solutions (Chicago)
• Partner Engineer, Mobile, HTML5
• Marketing Manager (Singapore)
• Marketing Manager (Sydney) – Contract
• Marketing Manager, Japan (Tokyo)
• Strategic Partner Development, Prepaid Card Partnerships
• Account Manager, Global Marketing Solutions, Politics (Washington, DC)
• Account Manager, QSR (New York)
• Account Manager, Entertainment (Los Angeles)
• Ad Operations Analyst, Global Marketing Solutions (Austin)
• Media Solutions, Norwegian (Dublin)
• Media Solutions, Swedish (Dublin)
• Agency Development Lead – US
• Client Partner, QSR (Atlanta, Dallas or Chicago)
• Client Partner (Tokyo)
• Client Partner (Seoul)
• Head of Sales, Poland/CEE (London)
• Strategic Partner Development, Prepaid Card Partnerships
• Strategic Partner Manager, Gaming (Tokyo)
• Account Manager – Gaming, (Dublin)
• Associate, Business Operations, API
• Analyst, Risk Operations (Hyd)
• Associate, User Operations, Intellectual Property (Austin)
• Technology Partner, Finance
• Associate, Business Operations, Mid-Market Sales (Austin)
• Administrative Assistant (New York)
• Administrative Assistant – Mobile

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

There are a few lessons you could take away from the fact that FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com exists right now:

1.  Ask and ye shall receive, especially if you’re Chris Sacca.
2. The Hacker Way goes way beyond Facebook headquarters.
3. Facebook IPO fever is definitely in full swing and we should all just give in to it.

Here’s the story: Angel investor and all-around web magnate Chris Sacca wrote a quick tweet early yesterday about how it’d be cool if there was a website where people could predict where Facebook’s stock will end up at the end of its first day as a publicly traded company. Horse races in general are always fun to watch, after all, and it’s definitely a conversation that’s happening around many a watercooler now that Facebook’s IPO is officially on for tomorrow morning.

So a programmer named James Proud answered the call, hacking together FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com, a fun little website that keeps a running tally of people’s bets on where Facebook’s stock will close on IPO day.

@sacca Ok!—
James Proud (@jamesproud) May 16, 2012

The site, which went live yesterday afternoon, says it was “quickly knocked together with Python, Tornado, Postgres, Redis, Heroku, no sleep and Bootstrap.” It’s pretty simple: Anyone with a Twitter account can sign in and place his or her bet on what price Facebook’s stock will be at market close tomorrow afternoon.

Some big names in the web have weighed in on the site already: Chris Sacca thinks it will close at $56, while Chris Dixon predicts a slightly more modest $50.

And what’s the general consensus at the moment? As of press time (or clicking publish on WordPress time) the site says that 475 people have predicted an average closing share price of $54, which values the company at more than $135 billion. That’s a 42 percent boost over the $38 share price of its IPO — not too shabby. Anyway, if you’re so inclined go on over and place a bet of your own. At this point there’s no fighting the Facebook IPO fever — and if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Facebook priced its initial public offering at $38 per share, which is at the high end of the range it proposed on Tuesday. The price will raise about $16 billion and give the social network a valuation over $100 billion.

The company plans to list 421.2 million shares of its common stock on the Nasdaq on Friday under the symbol FB. Facebook is offering 180 million of its shares. The remainder of the shares come from existing stockholders — a number of whom decided Wednesday to sell a greater proportion of their shares. Additionally, underwriters have the option to purchase up to 63.18 million additional shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments, which they are expected to sell based on demand seen during Facebook’s roadshow. This would increase the total sale by about $2.4 billion.

The IPO will be largest ever for a technology company and the third largest overall in the U.S., behind Visa and General Motors.

Last month, the social network reported revenues of $1.058 billion for the first quarter of the calendar year — a 45 percent increase from the first quarter last year, but 6 percent less than the previous quarter. Facebook, which was founded in 2004, had $1 billion in net income on $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011. The company generates the majority of its revenue from advertising, with about 15 percent coming from its payments business. Facebook collects a 30 percent cut of revenues from digital and virtual goods purchased with its Credits currency.

Some investors wonder how the social network’s monetization efforts will perform on mobile devices, where it so far has shown a limited number of ads. However, since filing for an IPO in February, Facebook acquired three mobile companies, including popular photo-sharing app Instagram. On Tuesday, the company hired the team from Lightbox, a similar photo-sharing app for Android devices.

Other questions arose about the effectiveness of Facebook’s display advertising when General Motors said this week that it was re-evaluating its paid media efforts on the site after seeing little impact on sales. Other brands, including Ford, came to the defense of the social network and suggested GM might not have applied proper strategy to Facebook.

In its IPO prospectus, Facebook admits that its ad model is nascent. “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” it says in the filing.

Facebook shares will start trading at $38 tomorrow, the company confirmed in a release, giving it a valuation of $104.12 billion. Facebook and its early shareholders will raise just over $16 billion in tomorrow’s much anticipated IPO.

At a $104 billion valuation, Facebook is worth more than any other tech IPO candidate at the time of its offering. It also perfectly matches what Facebook shares have been trading at in secondary markets over the last several months. Google was worth $23 billion at the time of its very unusual Dutch auction IPO back in 2004. As of tomorrow Facebook will be worth about half of what Google is worth now.

The proceeds of the sale are actually split between Facebook and early shareholders like Peter Thiel, DST and Accel Partners. Facebook is only selling 180 million shares while the other stockholders are parting ways with 241,233,615 shares. On top of that Facebook has given the investment banks underwriting the IPO the 30-day option of selling up to 63,185,042 extra shares. At final pricing, that would be worth $2.4 billion, but it’s likely that Facebook stock will pop a bit tomorrow.

Because Facebook priced at the higher end of its $34 to $38 price range, this suggests that there will unsurprisingly be a lot of demand tomorrow. Bankers will want to price the deal so that there’s a bit of a pop for good publicity, but Facebook won’t want to under-price the deal so much that they leave billions of dollars on the table.

Accel Partners, the first venture firm that backed Facebook, will walk away with $1.9 billion from the sale of its shares. Goldman Sachs will take away $1.1 billion after its late stage investment in the company last year.

Facebook will have the third largest IPO in U.S. history. Only Visa and Italian electric utility ENEL raised more in their IPOs. It’s valuation would also make Facebook worth slightly more than Amazon, which has a $98 billion market cap.

A $104 billion market capitalization puts Facebook at more than 100 times its trailing earnings. That’s a big multiple to live up to, and it will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation.

Shares will begin trading tomorrow at 11am Eastern Time after Mark Zuckerberg remotely rings the NASDAQ opening bell from Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. Zuckerberg is expected to give a speech or at least a few remarks from Facebook HQ courtyard tomorrow morning, and preparations for the ceremony are already underway.

It has been confirmed: Facebook will go public at $38 per share, valuing the company at $104 billion, with the firm expected to raise $16 billion in its offering. News of the final pricing was broken by CNBC.

As our own Robin Wauters reported earlier, an additional $2.4B could be raised:

There’s also an additional 63,185,042 shares that can be sold by underwriters to cover excess demand. At a $38 price, that could translate to another $2.4 billion billion raised in the initial public offering, though proceeds would go to Facebook shareholders who exercize their right to sell the shares, not Facebook.

Exactly how much will be raised in the offering is somewhat flexible. According to MSNBC:

The offering will raise more than $16 billion for Facebook and selling shareholders, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and ultimately could raise up to $18.4 billion, assuming underwriters exercise their option for “overallotments” to meet strong demand.

Given strong demand, TNW anticipates that the full $18.4 billion will be raised.

Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was likely set to debut at $38 per share. It had been rumored that the company might add $1 to its share price, moving it to $39, but it appears that in final talks, the share price remained at the $38 level.

Facebook has, since its first filing, both raised the price of its offering, and the number of shares that it is releasing:

• Earlier this week, Facebook set a share price range of between $34 and $38, which was itself hiked up from a prior $28-$35 range.
• After boosting its IPO size by almost 25% just yesterday by offering 84 million extra shares, a total of 421,233,615 shares will be sold in the offering.
• Facebook’s IPO is set to release around 18% of the company to the public.

This will be the second largest US IPO of all time, behind Visa’s $19.65 billion flotation. Facebook has yet to refile its S-1, but will likely do so in the very near future. What follows is a copy/paste of the press release from Facebook: MENLO PARK, Calif., May 17, 2012 — Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) today announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 421,233,615 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $38 per share. The shares are expected to begin trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market on May 18, 2012, under the symbol “FB.” Facebook is offering 180,000,000 shares of Class A common stock and selling stockholders are offering 241,233,615 shares of Class A common stock. Closing of the offering is expected to occur on May 22, 2012, subject to customary closing conditions.

In addition, Facebook and the selling stockholders have granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 63,185,042 additional shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments, if any.

Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Goldman, Sachs & Co., BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Allen & Company LLC, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank Securities are serving as book runners for the offering. RBC Capital Markets and Wells Fargo Securities are serving as active co-managers.

The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus. Copies of the prospectus related to the offering may be obtained from: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, 180 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York 10014, Attention: Prospectus Department (Tel: +1 866 718 1649; e-mail: prospectus@morganstanley.com); J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, NY 11717, (Tel: +1 866 803 9204); or Goldman, Sachs & Co., 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, Attention: Prospectus Department (Tel: +1 866 471 2526, e-mail:prospectus-ny@ny.email.gs.com).

A registration statement related to these securities has been filed with, and declared effective by, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

Music video service Vevo has doubled its total registered users as a result of switching to Facebook-only login and adding more personalized features in March, Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff tells us. The company is also looking at other ways to partner and integrate with Facebook, including advertising.

Vevo gained as many registered users in 60 days as it had previously taken two years to acquire. Although Caraeff won’t reveal the exact total of registered users, he says it is in the single-digit millions. Vevo has also seen a 150 percent increase in referrals to its website from Facebook and a threefold increase from Facebook mobile to Vevo’s mobile apps since March.

“The results have been great,” Caraeff says of the company’s Facebook integration. “It’s been absolutely the right move for our business.”

In January, Vevo launched integration with Facebook Open Graph so that users can automatically share their viewing activity with friends on the social network. In March, it overhauled its website and eliminated the option to log in with services besides Facebook. Although Vevo doesn’t require users to log in to watch videos, it has added a number of features for those users who do. For example, it will create personalized playlists based on users’ Facebook activity and profile information. The company also launched a Facebook canvas application to give users the option of searching, viewing and sharing videos directly from the social network.

Caraeff would not comment on Vevo’s current business arrangement with Facebook besides saying that Vevo is whitelisted to sell and serve ads within its canvas application, as seen in the screenshot below.

“We hope to have an even bigger business of ads with them in the future,” he says of the social network.

For ads served within videos hosted on YouTube, Vevo gives 35 percent of revenue to Google. That means when Facebook users share YouTube links to Vevo videos on Facebook and their friends see an ad before the video plays within News Feed or Timeline, Google is the one that collects ad revenue, not Facebook.

Facebook has significantly expanded and diversified the list of third-party apps and websites that integrate its platform since launching Open Graph in September 2011, but so far it hasn’t taken any steps to directly monetize them. Besides the likely expansion of its Credits payment system, of which it takes a 30 percent fee, Facebook could also introduce an ad revenue sharing model.

Rumors that Vevo would end its deal with YouTube and switch to one with Facebook began to circulate earlier this year after some outlets reported that Vevo was having meetings with representatives from the social network. Caraeff says Vevo has a good relationship with both Google and Facebook, and that the company’s strategy is to be ubiquitous across platforms and devices.

“We want to have music wherever the fan wants it to be,” he says, pointing out that Vevo is available through apps on connected TVs and it syndicates content on a number of other sites. “We’re not telling our audience where to go and we’ve never tried to say our videos should not be available somewhere.”

Still, Facebook is a powerful driver of traffic and engagement, and Vevo and other apps and sites are looking for ways to benefit. Caraeff tells us he’s interested in doing even more integration with Facebook, though he could not discuss the specifics of any potential new features.

“We want to integrate Facebook more natively with features that are available now or in the future,” Caraeff says. “What we really want to do is enable a continuous-playing, long-form experience.”

Vevo has seen a 750 percent increase in the number of stories being published to Facebook and a 50 percent increase in Likes and comments on those stories since March. The mobile integration has led Facebook to become the largest traffic driver to Vevo’s app download pages. Caraeff says the company is also working on an HTML5 version of its app, which will allow visitors from Facebook and other mobile environments to watch Vevo videos without first downloading a native mobile app.

Vevo currently has 770,000 monthly active Facebook users, according to our AppData traffic tracking service.

Tiny sidebar and news feed ads aren’t going to cut it. If Facebook wants to live up to a $104 billion valuation it will need bold new revenue streams. An offsite ad network, big glossy news feed ads, and payments for physical goods are a few ways it could boost its average revenue per user far beyond the puny $4.34 a year it earns today.

Facebook has a tough decision to make now that’s going public. It will have to strike a new balance between the good of its users, advertisers, app developers, and investors. If it refuses to explore new business models, its share price could sink. But if it strays too far in favor of making money, Facebook could lose its addictiveness and the faith of its users. Here’s the four aces Mark Zuckerberg could have up his sleeve.

The AdSense Killer

Most ads suck because most advertisers don’t know much about who you are. But Facebook does. What if any website could use everything Facebook knows about you to show you ads you’d want to click? Well, those sites would pay Facebook a lot of money. They also might use Facebook to replace Google AdSense, the current leader amongst ad networks, which analyzes a site and automatically displays relevant ads.

Facebook’s ad network essentially turn ad real estate on any website into places to serve the campaigns that advertisers buy for display on Facebook.com. Anyone currently logged into Facebook who visits one of these sites would be shown ads targeted by their Facebook information, such as age, gender, location, work and education history, interests, app usage, and friends. Facebook and the site hosting an ad would then split the money made on clicks or impressions.

Facebook has denied this product is in the works whenever it’s been asked, but last week it revised its privacy policy to expand its ability to serve ads to its user while they’re outside of Facebook.com. There’d be little reason to do this if something wasn’t in the works. The march across the web of its other social plugins such as the Like button have also paved the way for an ad network plugin. It might need to develop or acquire a company with expertise in analyzing site content so it could serve somewhat relevant ads to site visitors who aren’t logged in to Facebook.

The biggest obstacle, and likely the reason Facebook hasn’t already launched an offsite ad network, is that the world might not be ready. People are already skittish about Facebook using all their personal data to target them with ads when they’re on its site. Even though Facebook wouldn’t technically be “tracking” user web browsing history to power ad targeting, seeing offsite ads targeted from their onsite data might cause some people to have an all-out privacy meltdown. But if it worked, the ad network could double or triple Facebook’s ad revenue.

PayBook

Facebook has its own virtual currency called Credits that’s typically used to let gamers make in-game purchases like powerups, clothing for their characters, and of course, cows for their farms. Users buy the Credits for $0.10 each, and when they spend them Facebook gives 70% to the game’s developer and keeps the other 30%. These in-game payments are a healthy business for Facebook, and they’ve made game developers like Zynga rich because creating and selling virtual goods is cheap.

The problem is that the 30% tax is too high to for people to sell physical goods for Credits. And while Apple also charges 30% to sell music, games, and in-app purchases through iTunes and its App Store, it has a tight grip on the digital media market. Facebook allows media sales with Credits, but only a few developers and content producers are experimenting with it as the tax is prohibitive.

But if Facebook wanted to get serious about making money on payments, it could reduce its 30% tax for digital media and physical goods. In fact, its S-1 filing to IPO noted that “In the future, if we extend Payments outside of games, the percentage fee we receive from developers may vary.” That could turn Facebook into a competitor to Amazon for the huge market of physical goods, and pit it against Apple, Google, and Amazon for selling music, films, and more.

The real power of Facebook Payments comes in its tie in with Facebook Connect. Together they could one day let you make a purchase and fill in your shipping info anywhere on the web with just a click or two. Before privacy fear-mongers in the media and congress made Facebook retreat, the social network briefly allowed apps to ask for your home address, aka your shipping address. Eventually Facebook will bring this back. Then this frictionless purchase system could increase conversion rates for ecommerce stores enough that they’d gladly implement Facebook Payments and Connet…

Charging For Apps For Your Identity

There were over 550,000 apps and integrated websites on the Facebook platform as of a few years ago. Many rely on Facebook’s identity system to replace or provide an easier alternative to signing up for an app-specific account complete with another password to remember and profile to fill out. This service saves app developers from having to build their own identity system, and primes users for social sharing that can drive crucial referral traffic to apps.

Could Facebook convince some of the developers to pay either a subscription or per-user fee? Yes, but the price would have to be steep to make it a serious revenue stream. If it got 300,000 apps paying $100 a month each it’d still only be make $360 million a year. $100 a month could be a bargain for popular apps, but it might discourage smaller developers from signing on. Meanwhile a per user fee would disincentivize growth, and force apps that suddenly get popular to abandon Facebook’s identity platform.

Charging for identity has potential, but it could also backfire and send developers fleeing to Twitter and Google’s free identity systems. That’s a huge problem because Facebook relies on third-party apps to contribute content to its news feed which Facebook monetizes with ads. So instead I think Facebook’s best bet to boost revenue in the short-term is…

Big, Glossy News Feed Ads

Advertisers don’t want to have their message crammed into the little sidebar ad boxes. And while they’re happy to have their ads made social as Sponsored Stories and injected into the news feed everyone reads, they also want less subtle marketing options. Facebook is trying to be flexible with the launch of Reach Generator and the big logout page ad unit, but advertisers want a louder marketing channel within the core Facebook experience. But beyond advertisers and investors looking to make a quick buck, nobody wants to see more ads on Facebook.

So the trick is for Facebook to make ads seem like content instead. Content we actually want to consume. Tiny boxes don’t do that, but large, high-impact full screen or near-full screen ads could. Flipboard and some other mobile apps have been experimenting with these big, glossy ad formats in their mobile apps.

Imagine scrolling down your news feed on the web or mobile and when you got to where there’d be a “More” button or fold (if Facebook didn’t have infinite scrolling), you’d see a large or full-screen ad. You could scroll right over it, or Facebook could make it snap into place for a second before you were free to move on.

These ads could be clicked to open an advertiser’s presence on Facebook such as their Page or App, or to open the buyer’s website. Facebook could even require the ads to be social, essentially creating a glossy Sponsored Story format that could only reach you if you Liked the advertiser’s Page or your friends had interacted with or Liked the brand.

As Facebook’s user base is quickly shifting to mobile where it only shows a few Sponsored Stories ads a day rather than multiple ads per page on the web, glossy ads could let Facebook make more money on mobile without having to show ads too frequently. Users might complain at first, and it could make people slightly less likely to visit the news feed. Still, Facebook could watch the data and manage rate limits to show these glossy ads only occasionally, and less often to users who immediately leave the site or app when they see them.

The fact is that Facebook is responsible to its outside shareholders, even if they don’t have enough voting rights to forcibly change the company’s course. If investors are smart, they won’t grumble if Facebook doesn’t immediately flood the site and the rest of the web with ads, payments, and subscription fees. Facebook got us all to connect. Now its biggest challenge is to remain cool while making more money. If Facebook expands its revenue streams slow and steady, it will have an ocean of users to draw from for years to come.

–

More Big Facebook News

Facebook Will Have The Biggest Tech IPO Ever, Raising $16 Billion With $38 Share Price

Here’s What Could Kill Facebook

Zuckerberg Will Ring In Facebook IPO From Menlo Park HQ On Friday