A growing number of companies are placing a big bet on the social network and creating a burgeoning Facebook economy that extends far beyond Silicon Valley, as Facebook evolves from a site on which classmates reconnect to the Web’s center of gravity.
Boston’s piece of this social media domain - ranging from software development to marketing prowess - is small, compared with New York’s or San Francisco’s, but thriving. While business software, computer networking, and data management have traditionally been strengths for the local technology sector, more social media companies are emerging, analysts say.
“Boston is coming on pretty strong, accurately sizing up the opportunities in social media,’’ said Rich Levandov, managing director of Avalon Ventures, a Cambridge venture capital firm that specializes in technology and life sciences start-ups. “Anyone who is thinking of business now has to think about it three ways: the open Web, mobile, and Facebook.’’
Here’s why: Facebook is a gold mine for advertisers. Its users spend more time on the site than anywhere else on the Internet. The average US Facebook user logs almost eight hours a month on the site, more than the average user of Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and AOL combined, according to Nielsen Co., which measures Internet usage.
Facebook already is a place where more than a quarter of all online display ads - such as banner ads on websites - are seen, giving the company an estimated $2 billion in US ad revenue this year, according to eMarketer Inc., which tracks online advertising.
What makes Facebook’s dominance even more remarkable is that it is still a fairly young company. Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook in 2004 and moved to Palo Alto, Calif., where he expanded the company with investor funding. In Boston tech circles, the loss of Facebook is a commonly heard lament, but at a recent conference at Stanford University for technology start-ups, Zuckerberg said if he could go back in time, he might have stayed.
