Social Networking, Revenue | featured news

Zynga reports a sharp drop in its losses in the last three months of 2012, as revenues at the designer of games including Farmville stabilised.

Facebook says it is testing a service that will charge users $1 to guarantee that messages they send to people they are not connected to arrive in users' inboxes, rather than in an often-ignored folder called "other."

Facebook is rolling out a feature that will let users give presents from their network profiles, marking the company’s first big step into offering physical goods. The new service goes way beyond the network’s old gift feature, which let you send virtual puppies and hearts. It’s more of a riff on the company’s ill-fated Deals service — which the company shuttered after four months — but with a twist.

Facebook Inc said it will start charging businesses to run Offers on its social network, turning a previously free service into a potential revenue generator at a time when Wall Street is demanding new sources of growth and profit from the company

Facebook’s results illustrated a reality for social media: It’s a soft sell medium in which advertising may not be that interesting or relevant to consumers. This is important because it means the revenue potential for social media companies such as Facebook may not be as high as many people assumed.

Foursquare is rolling out its first revenue product as the company moves from focusing on user growth to generating cash. The new Promoted Updates enables businesses to send promoted content to users. These updates will appear at the top in a prominent position in the “Explore” tab in Foursquare. That’s the section of the app that is for users to find businesses nearby. The Promoted Updates, like Google search ads, there is “intent” there while users are looking for a restaurant, bar or other business nearby, says Steven Rosenblatt, Foursquare’s chief revenue officer. Businesses pay on a “cost per action” performance basis for these ads. In some ways these updates are also like Twitter’s promoted Tweets.

For all the huge numbers in Facebook's IPO papers, a surprisingly small figure stands out: $4.39, the amount the site generated per user last year....

Facebook's first-half revenue roughly doubled to $1.6 billion, underscoring the world's largest social network's appeal to advertisers.

Facebook's financial performance is stronger than previously believed, as the Internet social network's explosive growth in users and advertisers boosted 2009 revenue to as much as $800 million, according to two sources familiar with the situation.