Facebook Raises Another $25M

conq writes "BusinessWeek reports that Facebook has just raised another $25M from Venture Capital. Along the same lines, Rupert Murdoch has bought a minority stake in SimplyHired and just two days ago the social networking site, Visible Path said it raised $17M from Venture Capitals."

Comments

students?

[celardore]

I don't get where all the ad revenue comes from. These sites target the student demographic generally. Are students richer today than when I was in college or something?

I barely had enough money for a beer - let alone for spending on some product that I saw advertised on Facebook.

A call to my parents may be in order about the backdated pocket money I must be owed.

Re:students?

[HarvardAce]

These sites target the student demographic generally. Are students richer today than when I was in college or something?

The 18-to-25 (i.e. college) demographic is one of the most sought-after demographics by advertisers. While they may not have as much money as the 25-45 demographic, they are much more susceptible to advertising at this age, and it is at this age that people begin to really attach to brands. If Jeep can get you to buy one of their cars at this age, then you're much more likely to buy a Jeep down the line as well.

Additionally, as others have noted, this demographic has enormous spending power due to the ease at which credit is extended to those in the demographic. Between the ages of 18-25, many people are not very fiscally responsible, and can amass a large amount of debt. Then they have to cut their spending from 25-45 as they try and pay off all those debts they got during their college years.

I'd also venture a guess that the people who spend the most time on Facebook are the ones that are easily influenced by social pressures and therefore advertisements as well. It would be an interesting study for someone who needs a psychology thesis. If you take my idea, however, make sure you give me credit!

Re:Where does all that money go?

[Anonymous Coward]

They also gain cubic shit-tons of data about the interests of the people involved.

They have all kinds of pages that give you information broken down by colleges or about the majority of facebook in general. I imagine they have much more they don't tell us about. If I was marketing something to college students I have to say I'd give them my money.

Never seen facebook.

[schlick]

I have been intereseted in the idea of social networks since the "6-degrees" days. I got a friendster account when it was new, before it sucked. When their network preformance was consistantly bad I switched to MySpace. Everyone of my friends is some one I've met in person, and the majority are people I interact with socially IRL regularly. MySpace will let you do anything pretty much on your profile. I hate it when people make god-awful pages, but that's the price you have to pay for openness and configurability. I've never been to the facebook site, because I've never been a college student. I guess it appeals to college students I'm not one so it doesn't appeal to me. Strange how that works. I have several friends who are in college and we use MySpace to communicate sometimes. I think the majority of people don't use myspace a tool for communicating with their friends as much as they use it as a substitute for pr0n.

Would it have been too much to ask...

[ncc74656]

...that the submitter (and editors, if the submitter forgets) put in a brief explanation of what Facebook is, and why we (the readers) should care about it? I have a vague idea of what SimplyHired is/does (it's kinda obvious from the name) and the article does manage to refer to Visible Path as a "social networking site." As it stands, the article is about as useless as a post about a new version of $OBSCURE_SOFTWARE_PACKAGE that doesn't bother saying what $OBSCURE_SOFTWARE_PACKAGE is or what it does.

Some of the earlier posts indicate that it's yet another social-networking type of site, aimed at college students. For those of us who now work for a living, would it have been too much to ask to mention that in the article?