Happy Birthday Facebook

Today Facebook is celebrating its 10th birthday with record earnings and 1.2 billion users.
It was founded in 4 February 2004.

The network Mark Zuckerberg started in a Harvard dormitory room,  where ironically teenagers were its only demographic, now has 1.23 billion active users.Its revenues jumped 55% to $7.87bn in 2013 while profits grew sevenfold, bringing the annual total to £1.5bn.

Interestingly, teen decline was off the agenda in this quarter's earnings call, in contrast to the previous one, when chief financial officer David Ebersman did admit it was losing some of its younger audience.

Shortly afterwards, Facebook's bid to buy Snap chat failed, so this time around, the social network was concentrating on the positives - mobile advertising.

This brought in a whopping $2.34bn, over half of its total revenue, with the firm promising to further improve data tracking and the usefulness of its ads.

Anyone bemused by why their news feed is serving up cures for baldness when they have a full head of hair or miracle diets when they are stick-thin will be pleased to hear that Facebook is working to make ads more relevant.