History of Social Media Business

A History of the Business of Social Media 1978 1993 1994 Beverly Hills Internet Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, two computer hobbyists, invent the com- puterized bulletin board system (BBS) to inform friends of meet- ings, make announcements and share information. Students at the University The Internet is referred to of Illinois at Urbana- launches GeoCities, a as the Information Champaign develop Mosaic, the browser service that allows users to Superhighway. create their own websites. Newsweek features an credited as making the World Wide Web available article, "The Internet? Bah!," that disounts the influence of the Internet and predicts it will never replace IM to the public, and Web pages as we know them today were born. traditional media. 1998 1997 1995 Blogging service Blogger GeoCities goes public. launches. GeoCities surpasses one million members. The Web has one million websites Friends Reunited, the The dot.com bubble first social network to AOL Instant bursts and the future of achieve popularity, was founded in Great Britain to Messenger lets users the Internet is uncertain. chat. locate past school friends. Blogging begins. Yahoo buys GeoCities for $3.57 billion. Google launches. 2000 2002 2003 Facebook launches for Seventy million computers are connected to the AOL has 34 million members. Google buys Blogger. students at Harvard. It's Linden Lab introduces the Internet. referred to as a college MySpace launches, virtual world, Second Life. version of Friendster. An Social networking site Friendster launches. It Linkedin launches as a social networking site for professionals. unnamed investor offers Mark Zuckerberg $10 million to buy it. Zuckerberg declines. grows to 3 million users in three months. Its user base peaks in 2008. 2005 2004 MySpace is the most popular social networking Friends Reunited, now News Corp buys with 15 million members, is MySpace for $580 sold to the British television million. MySpace outperforms Friendster in page views. site in the US. company ITV. YouTube begins storing and retrieving videos. Digg launches as a social news site where people can share content from Viacom offers to buy Facebook for $75 million. Facebook declines. It launches for high school anywhere on the Web. Bebo-an acronym for Blog Early, Blog Often- launches as another social You Tube students. networking site. 2006 2007 Google gets 400 million Facebook outperforms MySpace in terms of monthly unique visitors. It launches Beacon, an Viacom returns with an offer to buy Facebook for $1.5 billion, but the deal Google offers to buy Facebook for $15 searches a day. Twitter is born. billion. falls through. Yahoo tries to buy Facebook for $I billion, Apple releases the iPhone. advertising system that exposes user purchasing activity. MoveOn.org and many others protest, calling it an invasion of privacy. Beacon shuts down in but Facebook declines the offer. Facebook extends its membership to anyone over the age of 13 and releases Facebook Platform, a service that let's third-party develop- ers create apps for the site 2009. 2009 2008 ITV sells the relatively Twitter breaks the news Bebo is purchased by Facebook is ranked as unsuccessful Friends AOL. story about a plane landing in the Hudson River. the most-used social Reunited to Brightsolid network worldwide, with Facebook tries to buy Twitter for $500 Limited. Unfriend is the New more than 200 million users. The site's traffic is Facebook reaches more than 400 million users. It surpasses Google's weekly traffic. Oxford American Diction- million. ary word of the year. twice that of MySpace Tumblr launches. Microsoft launches Bing MySpace popularity declines to 57 million to compete with Yahoo and Google. facebook. users. 2010 To compete with Facebook Apple releases the iPad. and Twitter, Google The population of Internet is estimated at The Internet surpasses 1.97 billion users, newspapers as a primary way for Americans to get the global population. news. It's the third most popular news platform, with many users using social media and personalized feeds to gather news. launches Buzz, a social nearly 30 percent of networking site integrated with Gmail. In its first week, millions of Gmail users created 9 million posts. AOL sells Bebo to Criterion Capital Partners. 2011 Tumblr hits I billion MySpace and Bebo are redesigned and updated to compete with the far more called Ping. successful Facebook and There are more than 550 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets sent through Twitter each day, and 2 billion video views per Apple introduces a music-based social network News Corp. sells MySpace to digital media firm Specific Media for $35 million. page views per month, 2 million posts per day and plans to start generating some revenue. Pinterest launches as a Twitter. Facebook reaches an annual revenue of $3.7 billion. day on YouTube. content curation site. Linkedin has 90 million professional users and goes public. 2012 Linkedin is the second Twitter reaches 12,233 Tweets per second Google+ launches. Facebook files for an most popular social media site in the U.S., with 33.9 million monthly unique visitors. IPO and plans to raise $10 billion by the time it begins selling shares this spring, valuing the company between $75 billion and Pinterest drives more during the Super Bowl. traffic to retailers than Linkedin, YouTube and Google+, reaching 10 million monthly Twitter delivers 33 100 billion-a stock- billion Tweets per day. unique visitors faster than any other standalone site ever. It secures $27 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. market record. 8+ Pinterest competitor Snip.it launches SOURCES: UNCP, MEDIABISTRO, FACEBOOK, TECHCRUNCH, MASHABLE, WSJ. BBS DOCUMENTARY, FINANCIAL TIMES DESIGN: DAVID FOSTER ...... ............ .......... ............ ...... ►·…......... ........... D