14 DAY TRIAL // Ten years ago, at Harvard University, a worldwide phenomenon was born – Facebook.
The network was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
Originally, this was a network available just for Harvard students, only to expand to other colleges in the Boston area. From there, it started getting support from students from other universities before becoming open to everyone in the world in 2005.
The social network started from scratch, managed to attract a series of investments early on and has now grown into a true phenomenon. In December 2004, Facebook already had 1 million users. The network now has over 1.23 billion monthly users, while 757 million visit Facebook daily.
Looking into the network’s earnings report, you’ll discover that it managed to come up with a profit of $1.5 billion (€1.1 billion) in 2013 alone.
What’s more important is that Facebook has become such an important part of our digital culture nowadays. It has become a way to connect to old friends, locate ex-classmates and share important life events with the friends that are too far away to be there in person.
Since February 2004, the network has seen over 201.6 billion friend connections, over 6 billion likes per day (in December 2013) and 400 billion photos shared since October 2005. A staggering 7.8 trillion messages were sent using Facebook, and people posted 77.2 billion location-tagged posts.
“It’s been an incredible journey so far, and I’m so grateful to be a part of it. It’s been amazing to see how people have used Facebook to build a real community and help each other in so many ways. In the next decade, we have the opportunity and responsibility to connect everyone and to keep serving the community as best we can,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO.