Page 258 - The Digital Financial Services (DFS) Ecosystem

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Ecosystem

2.4.1 Facebook

In 2007, Facebook aggressively pursued revenue by facilitating a deeper relationship between merchants and
Facebook users, including:
• permitting advertising on a user’s page;

• enabling merchants/businesses to create their own customized Facebook pages;
• providing highly-targeted advertising capabilities;
• creating a platform for third-party developers to deliver games and other applications to Facebook users.

Facebook has since added other services, like enabling advertising on third-party websites. Facebook generates
revenue primarily from advertisers. Annual revenues have grown from $2B to $18B in just five years.

Figure 6 – Facebook revenues

2.4.2 WeChat
Tencent Holdings owns WeChat along with two other social networking and messaging platforms: QQZone,
and QQ. Tencent launched WeChat as a smartphone-focused app (which avoided PC legacy issues). Since its
2010 launch, WeChat has incorporated several revenue models into the WeChat platform, including:
• digital content (e.g., purchasing digital stickers to send to a friend);

• advertising through commercial accounts (analogous to Facebook pages) and on user feeds;
• transaction fees for facilitating commerce (ordering coffee, scheduling taxi rides, etc.).
Tencent does not break out WeChat revenue separately, but their total revenue has grown from $4 billion to
almost $16 billion in four years.

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