Facebook at 15: How the social network has conquered the Internet in less than two decades

"Is this maybe the next big thing?" That was the question asked to Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 by a CNBC reporter. Less than three months earlier, on February 4, the 19-year-old Harvard student had launched a website called "TheFacebook". , which served as an online directory for his comrades. "When we started, we were hoping maybe 400 or 500 people," Zuckerberg told the host. "We are now at 100,000 people, so who knows where we are going now … Maybe we could create something cool."

Fifteen years after its creation, this number has now reached 2.32 billion, nearly one-third of the world's population. Meanwhile, the name of the social network may have shortened, but its activity has grown exponentially. He has engulfed the likes of Instagram and WhatsApp to become one of the world's largest technology companies, while making Zuckerberg the fifth richest person in the world.

Beyond its size, Facebook and Google now have a direct influence on more than 70% of Internet traffic. So how did it go from a dormitory project to the most influential company in the Internet era?

Floating over the competition at the beginning

Facebook was not the first social network. A year before its launch, MySpace appeared, which quickly became the largest social networking site in the world.

Its success has attracted a lot of attention, eventually leading to its acquisition by News Corporation for $ 580 million. For a brief moment, in 2006, Google became the most visited website in the US, but its star quickly began to fade.

The disappearance of MySpace has been attributed to the lords of his company. In his founding book on social media Write on the wallJournalist Tom Standage writes: "Her new owner treated her as a media rather than a technology platform and seemed more interested in maximizing advertising revenue than repairing or improving the technology behind the technology. site."

In contrast, Facebook was able to expand its user base by letting its users decide on the platform's orientation. New features like Facebook Chat had been requested by its users, while apps such as Farmville It turned out to be a surprise success that allowed to develop the commitment.

In 2010, Facebook surpbaded MySpace as people flocked to Zuckerberg's creation almost as quickly as they left MySpace. Two years later, Facebook became public, with Zuckerberg retaining a controlling stake in the shares, which meant he would have more to realize.

S tackle the tech giants

The success of Facebook has caught the attention of Google, which launched in 2011 what he hoped to become the largest social network in the world: Google+.

By combining all of Google's consumer products with a single online identity (Gmail, YouTube, etc.), the technology giant thought they could exploit Facebook in numbers. "Sharing online is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to solve this problem, "said Google's vice president of engineering in a blog post featuring Google+.

For a moment, it seemed that it could work. Less than a month after its launch, more than 10 million people had signed up and Facebook was feeling like the David at Google's Goliath again.

In response, Mark Zuckerberg declared a company-wide "lockdown" to define a strategy.

The tactics of the war room proved so effective that in 2018, Google+ had less than 7 million users, which ultimately pushed Google to advance the closure of its failed experiment.

Consolidate one's position

In 2012, Facebook has pbaded the billion-user mark and still shows no sign of slowing down. At this point, a number of startups appeared and competed with Facebook for the time spent in front of the screen.

One of them is Instagram, which had more than 50 million users since its launch in 2010. Although this is only a fraction of Facebook users, Zuckerberg has identified it as a threat, but a threat that could be neutralized and exploited.

A $ 1 billion acquisition finalized in September 2012 put Instagram under the control of Facebook, a price that now seems a boon given the growth of the photo-sharing platform, which now totals more than $ 1 billion. users.

The same tactic was used for the WhatsApp messaging application, acquired for $ 19.3 billion in 2014. Less than five years later, WhatsApp has experienced similar growth, rising from around $ 500 million to 1.5 billion users.

Together, more than 2.5 billion people worldwide use at least one of Facebook's social networking or messaging services. With about 4.2 billion people connected to the Internet in 2018, it seems that the only thing that is preventing Facebook's growth from continuing is the Internet itself.