Facebook doesn't just care about developing products.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's co-founder and CEO, said at the start of his 2004-year venture that he built Facebook to make money only second, develop better products is the main. Therefore, under such a concept, Facebook did develop excellent products, accumulated a large user base, but his development has been limited. Especially after the IPO this May. Today, especially in the mobile business, Zuckerberg has finally changed his mind, paying more attention to advertising and profitability.

Facebook shares rose 22% in Wednesday, benefiting from the positive effects of third-quarter results.

Analysts say the following three points are good news for Facebook:

1, Facebook sales growth finally stopped slowing;

2, advertising sales growth again accelerated;

3, Facebook mobile business is far stronger than the outside imagination.

But there is a more important reason behind these positives: Mark Zuckerberg changed his mind, which fundamentally changed the way Facebook operates.

When Facebook first filed a listing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Zuckerberg wrote to potential investors. In his letter, he warns that Facebook is not a company that manufactures products to make money, but a company that makes money to make its products. The words in the letter are: "Simply put: we are not building services to make money, but making money to build better services." ”

"Develop something cool."

This is not surprising. Zuckerberg made it clear from the outset that he built the thefacebook.com Web site in a Harvard dorm and later set up a real company in California not to earn a lot of money, but to "develop something cool" for the user.

As early as 2004, when Thefacebook.com was about to launch, Zuckerberg had a conversation with his friends about his first investor Saverin (Eduardo Saverin).

Mr. Zuckerberg: Eduardo is going to pay for my server.

Friend: That's ridiculous.

Zuckerberg: He thinks it can make money.

Friend: What do you think?

Zuckerberg: I don't know business. I'm content to do something cool.

From 2004 to May 18 this year, the idea of "not knowing business" and "doing something cool" has been applied to Facebook. Zuckerberg did make some cool things, and Facebook built a huge user base.

As Facebook grew, Mr. Zuckerberg also built a group of Super-class, handpicked engineers, developers and managers to work on his "products", such as messenger and news feeds, and a group of top employees for "advertising" work, Google executives, Facebook's chief operating officer Shirley Lie Sandberg (Sheryl Sandberg) reported on the job.

Business impaired

As a result, Facebook has developed innovative capabilities for users, such as instant messaging, which has defeated Aim,news Feeds are increasingly threatening aol.com and yahoo.com, while Facebook's advertising offerings are grossly inadequate, and ads on the right side of the facebook.com site are almost entirely ignored by users, and advertisers are unwilling to pay for them.

Facebook's business has been affected, and the huge number of users has forced advertisers to try to facebook.com poorly performing ads, but growth in advertising revenue has slowed since the start of 2011.

It now seems obvious that such a structure is wrong, but to be aware, investors have encouraged Facebook and Zuckerberg to stick to the idea, which Microsoft injected into Facebook in 2007 to value $15 billion trillion, Goldman Sachs again invested in 2011 and made Facebook a company worth 50 billion of dollars.

Also keep in mind that Facebook is gaining a high rate of user acceptance, and many smart people think of Facebook as the second-most-Google site. Google is a company with a market capitalisation of more than 200 billion dollars, and its leader Larry Page and Sergey (Sergey Brin) are happy to hand all revenue-related businesses to sales professionals, such as Armstrong (Tim Armstrong), and Nikos Arrola (Nikesh Aurora) MBA talent.

After setting up Google, Page and Brin have long ignored advertising and profitability, which set an example for a new generation of entrepreneurs, including Zuckerberg, and could be a bad example.

Jeffer Besos (Jeff Bezos) may be a better model, he is as patient, innovative and focused on users as Google founder, but he also knows how to build a business step-by-step. But Google's founders are also fortunate to have created search ads that have become an excellent business model in business history.

Encounter obstacles

From 2004 to 2012, Zuckerberg built Facebook into a company that did not consider making profits and only developed products until the recent change, and the two hurdles to Facebook's development path.

Facebook released Shares in May 2012 and began to deal with investors, but these investors will not be satisfied with the sheer number of Facebook users. At the same time, Facebook's vast majority of users are abandoning the traditional facebook.com of advertising-backed apps, and gradually adopting a Facebook mobile app without ads.

Within a few weeks, Facebook's market capitalisation shrank from $100 billion trillion to $50 billion trillion. Mr Zuckerberg may not care about money, but he knows that Facebook's low share price will hurt his ability to recruit good product developers.

This September, Zuckerberg attended the TechCrunch Disrupt Congress, the first public appearance after Facebook's listing. He admitted at the meeting that talented people joined Facebook not only because they liked the job but also because they wanted to "make a lot of money".

Now that Mr Zuckerberg has finally changed his mind about product profitability and Facebook's organizational structure, he even admits that moving to the move is not just a chance for him to lead Facebook to the top of the ladder, but that profitability will take on a more central role in the product.

Great changes

In the conference call after the earnings release, Zuckerberg also announced the dramatic changes that Facebook has made over the past few months. Teams that used to develop products for users and never cared about profit-making issues are now being asked to add ads to mobile apps. "We are now going to develop more comprehensive advertising products," Zuckerberg said. ”

"Historically, most ads are in the right column, which is an isolated experience," he says. Our advertising team and their responsibility is to promote the service and to provide this service to all product teams. Now, we have informed all the product teams that they are responsible for the advertising experience in the product. ”

Zuckerberg revealed that the first one to receive the instruction was the news Feed team. The result is already apparent. Two quarters ago, Facebook mobile news feeds did not generate any revenue, and now, according to David Ebersman, Facebook's chief financial officer, the product David Obersmann 3 million dollars a day, with an annual income of more than 1 billion dollars.

As early as 2004, Zuckerberg said he never worried about making money because he was "content to do something cool" and now he knows it's not his only option.