Matt recalls meeting Facebook's early team in 2004 when they were selling campus-targeted ads called flyers for $25 to $50 a day to local businesses. The company was also testing ads from bigger brands while gearing up to raise venture capital.
Questions this video answers
Flyers.
Between $25 and $50 a day.
Students at a specific college campus.
Do you know if they had any advertising at that point when they met with you? Yeah, I mean, at that point, they just started selling something called flyers. And flyers were basically built for mostly local small businesses. And the small businesses were spending anywhere between 25 and $50 a day to have an ad targeted towards a specific college campus. So if you were a local pizza place or a laundromat, you could buy ads to target kids at that specific campus for that spec version of Facebook. Because at first, Facebook is really broken down by college. And as they told me how well was doing, I said, well, would you guys take ads from big brands? Because we're working with Microsoft and Dunkin Donuts and Victoria's Secret, and they're like, yeah, we've been looking. We've been talking to a bunch of companies to hire somebody to actually do this. We're about to raise a big round of capital, blah, blah, blah. I said, okay, well, I might have a couple opportunities for you guys down the road.