A Face in the Crowd

The biggest problem we face today is the ability to discover new things. There's so much content out there. So many news stories, so many games, so many movies. How do I find the things that interest me?

What we've figured out is that Facebook can be a really powerful mechanism for social discovery and social distribution.

If a friend I know and trust, and is therefore close to me, is playing a game and enjoying it, there's a very good chance that I am interested in playing that game with that person. Therefore, my discovery of that game, not through external marketing but through my friends, is incredibly powerful.

So we're optimising our platform to provide that discovery and distribution for all types of content. Games have really proven the concept, at F8 we did a lot around music and video and news. We're seeing this mechanism be very effective. I think what you're referring to is that when we launched our platform all of our channels were open because we wanted to seed this mechanism and see it working.

What we found was, particularly around games, was that there are this group of people who love to play games, who spent a lot of time playing those games and share a lot about games to their friends. There's also a group who are okay about games, who are very casual players, then there's a group who are not very interested.

What we're doing is trying to put in place the right mechanisms that enable people to receive information based on their desire to view it. That's a complicated thing and it's taken several iterations to get it right. I think we're at that point now where, if you're not that interested in games, you don't see much game information, but if you're very interested you see a lot.

"We're optimising our platform to provide that discovery and distribution for all types of content"

We'll continue to dial that up and down based on all of the data we've received and the feedback we've received from our users. At the end of the day the key is to make sure the users are happy with their experience on Facebook. Make sure they're getting the right social discovery, that they're getting exposed to the right amount of things, that the mechanism works. Also making sure that we deliver sufficient distribution to our developers so that they can continue to build successful games and businesses.

I think as we've been tuning this the games industry on Facebook has been very successful. It's continued to be able to gain mass markets of users, tens of millions of users. They've worked out how to engage their users - the engagements levels have been way up over the last couple of years. And monetisation. They've really figured out how to provide the right things to the right people so that they're willing to pay for it.

So we're actually pretty happy with the way things are going - there's always a lot of work to do. We've got a dedicated games team here that's constantly looking at this and thinking about how to make it better. As we're now becoming effective with social distribution and discovery with news and music and video, we're learning a lot more about how to tune the system.

As long as they abide by our platform's policies, we're all for it. There's always going to be pieces of the puzzle that we don't build. We've explicitly answered, with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg on Charlie Rose, the question of whether Facebook was going to build games.

The answer was, no, we're not going to build games because games are really hard to build and our expertise is in building the platform. So we are 100 per cent focused on building the best possible platform to enable developers to build social experiences everywhere, particularly mobile, today.

That's our focus, when there are opportunities for third parties to build systems, like games, or mechanisms to help discover games, that's awesome.

Well I'm not going to comment on any company's valuation, including our own. I think the key is to look at the fundamentals of the business, at Facebook we continue to grow very rapidly. Our number of users in terms of engagement and monetisation are both up and to the right.

What's interesting is that we feel like we're just getting started. It's still very very early. We're at the beginning of a once in a lifetime, maybe once in history shift for all online experiences going social and social experiences being everywhere. So I view us as being very very early, and there being a ton of growth ahead of us.

No-one can control a valuation, that's a market-driven thing. I think the most important thing is where you're going to be in the long run. I feel very good about Facebook. When I look at what's happened in the social games industry, there's a tremendous amount of value that's been created in just a few years by building social games on the Facebook platform. We think that's awesome. We think that's going to continue.

There are many more companies to grow and do well in the industry. I think the key is that there's real revenue here.