Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, in a video recorded for prospective investors, said one of the company’s main sources of revenue gains will be mobile advertising.
“Mobile is a key area of growth for Facebook,” Sandberg said in the video, which Facebook will use to drum up interest in its shares before a planned initial public offering.
The company intends to raise as much as $11.8 billion in an IPO that would value it as high as $96 billion. Founded in 2004, Facebook makes most of its sales from online advertising for businesses that want to reach a user base of more than 900 million. It began this year to sell marketing messages tailored for mobile devices, part of a push to keep it from losing business to competitors including Twitter Inc. and Google Inc.
Facebook executives highlighted other ways they’re trying to help advertisers reach users. These include so-called Sponsored Stories, marketing messages woven into the status updates and other information on people’s profile pages.
“Sponsored Stories enable businesses to increase the reach and distribution of stories about their brand,” Sandberg said. “Today only a small fraction of our impressions are sponsored stories, which gives us lots of room to grow.”
The company had 488 million users who logged onto Facebook via mobile devices as of the end of March, according to its IPO filing.
“While most of our mobile users also access Facebook through personal computers, we anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile usage will exceed the growth in usage through personal computers for the foreseeable future, in part due to our focus on developing mobile products to encourage mobile usage of Facebook,” Facebook said in the filing.
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