Docs reveal how Eduardo Saverin sold The Facebook ads in 2004
Once upon a time (April 2004), a young man named Eduardo Saverin headed to New York to conduct a series of sales calls. He was hoping to persuade advertisers to place ads on a new site he and his friends at Harvard had started just a few months earlier. They called it The Facebook.
Saverin was just 19 at the time, but he put together an impressive media kit explaining what The Facebook is -- “an expanding online directory that connects students, alumni, faculty and staff through social networks at colleges and universities” -- and how many people were on it at the time -- a whopping 70,000.
The website Digiday.com got a copy of the slides from Saverin’s sales pitch from a New York-based marketer Saverin met with personally, and has posted it in its entirety on the site.
Reading the kit is a glimpse of Facebook when it was brand new, growing like crazy, and before its founders even knew all that it could be.
Saverin’s kit included Facebook’s mission statement -- “to expand to include most of the schools in the United States” and noted that by September 2004, it hoped to have more than 200 schools in the Facebook’s member network.
At the time, the user base was 55% Ivy League and 45% from other schools. The site was getting 3 million daily page views and 90 million monthly page views.
Saverin was offering advertisers the opportunity to “reach college students, alumni, faculty and staff at the library, their work, home or dorm rooms.”
Advertisers had the option of using traditional horizontal/vertical banners, or of doing targeted advertisements based on information that Facebook knew about its users. For example, you could choose to advertise to someone based on what school they went to, what type of degree they are earning, what courses they have taken, their sexual orientation or home city and ZIP Code.
They start so young....
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