Facebook\\\'s Zuckerberg the new mobile king

FE Team | Published: February 25, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. — AFP Photo

BARCELONA, Feb 24 (AFP) : Billionaire 29-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stars in the mobile industry's biggest fair Monday, fresh from his $19 billion (14-billion-euro) takeover of smartphone messenger WhatsApp.
The keynote speaker on the opening day of the February 24-27 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Zuckerberg has come a long way in the mobile world in a short time.
When Facebook sold its shares to the public in an initial public offering in May 2012, "it literally had no mobile advertising revenues," said Eden Zoller, analyst at the research house Ovum.
"It did actually have a pretty strong mobile user base at IPO but what it had failed to do at that time was actually monetise those mobile users," she said. At the time of the float, worries over the lack of money coming in from the mobile business sent Facebook's shares sliding.
But the social network-boasting more than 1.2 billion members-quickly repaired its strategy.
By the end of 2013, mobile devices accounted for 53 per cent of Facebook's advertising revenue, bringing in $1.2 billion in the last quarter and more than $3 billion over the whole year.
However mobile advertising can be "highly intrusive", Zoller cautioned, especially if it interrupts a user's engagement with an application.
"You have to be very careful." Nevertheless, the social network needs to keep up the momentum, the analyst said.