Facebook’s Chief Accounting Officer David Spillane stepping down, Jas Athwal taking the role
Facebook has announced that its Chief Accounting Officer David Spillane is stepping down from the role and will be replaced by Jas Athwal, the company’s Corporate Controller, Revenue.
The change, which was reported by Bloomberg and CNBC, is set to take place effective May 10. Spillane had been with the company for over four years, seeing the company through its IPO last year. Athwal has worked at Facebook for more than five years and was formerly Director of Revenue at Yahoo.
Spillane made headlines in recent months as he sold off portions of his stake in Facebook. He sold 256,000 shares last November and another 60,000 units in January. As of April 15, he had about 160,000 shares remaining.
Facebook reported on Wednesday a mixed first quarter with $1.46 billion in revenue and $0.12 earnings per share. Mobile ad revenue increased to 30 percent, or $375 million, of the overall advertising revenue and mobile users again outnumbered PC users.
The social networking site now has 1.11 billion monthly users, 751 million of which sign on from mobile devices.
Image credit: AFP/Getty Images
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Instagram outrage? Other apps that have ‘plunged’: Yahoo Social Bar, Pinterest, FarmVille, Spotify, Zoosk …
Update: Instagram has provided comment on the statistics, stating that the “data is inaccurate,” and that it continues “to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users.” This is precisely what TNW argued below. Don’t buy the hype, folks.
Instagram users are “outraged over new rules” and dumping the service en masse, the New York Post claims, backed by data from AppData.
Instagram “may have shed nearly a quarter of its daily active users in the wake of the debacle”, the New York Post writes.
AppData told The Post: “[We are] pretty sure the decline in Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement.”
Interesting. Let’s see what they have to say about the data:
Instagram, which peaked at 16.4 million active daily users the week it rolled out its policy change, had fallen to 12.4 million as of yesterday, according to the data.
Fascinating. But then you get follow-up articles like this piece of junk asserting that Facebook has lost $250 million in value because 25% of users have dumped the service, since Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion (only not really). Meanwhile, Facebook’s stock price is dropping.
Bloomberg TV is on it. The Wall Street Journal is on it.
Seriously, folks?
Maybe users are outraged at Instagram and leaving the service in droves. Likely not, though, and this certainly isn’t evidence of the contrary.
All I know is you see a similar pattern of decreased usage around the Christmas holidays for most popular Facebook-connected apps, according to – yes – data from AppData:
Yahoo’s Social Bar supposedly dropped from a peak of 5.8 million daily active users on Wednesday 19 December to 1.9 million daily active users on Wednesday 26 December, OMG a 67.2 percent decrease.
Outrage over what? Is Yahoo’s stock price falling yet?
Zoosk had 1.6 million daily active users on Wednesday 19 December and supposedly dropped to 1.1 million daily active users on Wednesday 26 December, OMG a 31.3 percent decrease.
Outrage over what?
Pinterest had 4 million daily active users on Thursday 20 December and supposedly dropped to 2.9 million daily active users on Thursday 27 December, OMG a 27.5 percent decrease.
Outrage over what?
Zynga’s FarmVille 2 had 8.4 million daily active users on Wednesday 19 December and dropped to 7.1 million daily active users on Thursday 27 December, OMG a 15.5 percent decrease.
Outrage over what?
Spotify had 9.1 million daily active users on Thursday 20 December and supposedly dropped to 8.2 million daily active users on Wednesday 26 December, a 9.9 percent drop.
Outrage over what?
Same trend for SongPop, CityVille, Diamond Dash, Candy Crush Saga, and so on. I could go on, but the gist is this:
Maybe, just maybe, there’s another explanation for Instagram’s supposed user purge than the terms of conditions ‘debacle’?
For one, AppData only tracks users who are logged into Instagram through Facebook, which is not a requirement for people to use the photo sharing service.
Even if we’d only be looking for ‘trends’, the last thing we’d want to check is daily active users of an app – it’s a terrible metric for trends.
Also, how do we know for sure AppData’s – or Facebook’s for that matter – statistics are correct? Not all popular apps show decreases in usage around the Christmas holidays, but many do, as you can see above, so that makes me a tad skeptical (and at least I’m not alone).
Update: or, as a commenter suggests, Facebook may have changed something API- or otherwise that may have caused skewed numbers for some FB-connected apps.
The timing also doesn’t add up whatsoever.
Instagram changed its Terms of Service on 17 December, admittedly causing some uproar over user privacy.
In an attempt to calm things down, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom half apologized on 18 December, and rolled back the ToS to the original version on 21 December.
Who can explain to me why there’s a supposed sharp drop in users between 24 and 25 December, then? It doesn’t make any sense to blame this on the aforementioned privacy concerns.
Meanwhile, it looks like Instagram isn’t exactly losing fans on Facebook after the ‘debacle’, according to data from Socialbakers:
Top image credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
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Obama spike! Surprise Reddit AMA sees 4.4m pageviews, 1.6m uniques in one day
Reddit, the funniest site on the Internet after 9GAG (I kid, I kid) certainly got a lot of attention when U.S. President Barack Obama decided to stop by for an impromptu ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) session on Wednesday.
The site also got a lot of incoming traffic thanks to a mountain of media reports and smart use of Team Obama’s social media channels – and of course hordes of existing redditors who are still dizzy from the event.
In case you’re keeping track: the AMA has 24,222 comments and counting.
In a separate thread, Reddit moderator karmanaut shared a link to traffic stats highlighting the huge spike that resulted in a bit of downtime for the site.
They’re now gunning for Jay-Z, by the way, which could cause 99 other problems.
The key takeaways from the shared ObAMA stats:
The iAmA subreddit welcomed 7,1 million unique visitors who accounted for 31.2 million pageviews in August so far (we assume those stats will be updated when the month actually ends).
For your comparison, the social news and community website clocked:
- 5.6 million uniques and 28.7 million pageviews in July 2012
- 4.8 million uniques and 23 million pageviews in February 2012 (six months ago)
- 3.6 million uniques and 17.7 million pageviews in September 2011
On Tuesday the 28th of August, about 556,000 unique visitors came to the site’s iAmA subreddit, driving 1.27 million pageviews for the day.
And that was a rather good day, traffic-wise.
On Wednesday the 29th of August, when President Barack Obama took to Reddit for the AMA, the subreddit registered 1.63 million unique visitors and a whopping 4.4 million pageviews for the day.
The day after, pageviews levelled off but the number of unique visitors stayed largely the same.
Update: in case we confused you, we’re sorry. Just to be clear: these are traffic stats for the iAmA subreddit section only, not the whole site. Amazing, yes.
The Obama spike is even more apparent when you look at the graph for the hourly metrics:
And here are the monthly and daily traffic statistic graphs, which are pretty self-explanatory:
And finally, the number of Presidential AMAs on Reddit so far (courtesy of user CherrySlurpee):
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Giveaway: A Few Extra Tickets To An Exclusive Screening Of CNBC’s “20 Under 20″ Documentary Wednesday Night
When we ran this post last week about this exclusive showing of a CNBC documentary about Peter Thiel’s 20 Under 20 fellowship, all of the tickets were scooped up by the end of the day. So CNBC decided to upgrade to a slightly larger theater for Wednesday night and is opening up a very small allotment of extra tickets this morning.
CNBC’s documentary is about Thiel’s controversial $100,000 fellowship to lure brilliant teenagers out of universities. Thiel has called higher education the next bubble, after real estate and dot-coms. He told TechCrunch last year, “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
So he backed up his beliefs with a provocative fellowship program. Called 20 Under 20, a select handful of brilliant, ambitious young people get $100,000 to ideally move to the San Francisco Bay Area to work on whatever they want for two years. They include the youngest person to have ever created nuclear fusion, teens that are working on medical imaging, mobile apps and solutions to alleviate global poverty and inequality.
Called “20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow,” CNBC’s documentary looks inside The Thiel Foundation and follows the journey of the 2012 application process and the personal stories of many of the teens who apply. The trailer is here.
They’re holding an exclusive preview of the documentary at the AMC Metreon in San Francisco on Wednesday night with a private reception afterward hosted by Julia Boorstin. We already sold out of the original batch. Tickets are first come, first serve. The show ultimately airs on Aug. 13 and 14 at 10pm ET/PT.
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Ancestry.com Agrees To $1.6 Billion Buyout Led By European Private Equity Firm Permira, Says WSJ
Genealogy website Ancestry.com — which filed for an IPO back in 2009 – has agreed to be acquired by an investor group led by European private equity firm Permira in a deal said to be worth about $1.6 billion, or $32 per share, the Wall Street Journal is reporting. The paper cites “people familiar with the matter” who point to expansion in Western Europe as a goal.
We’ve reached out to Ancestry.com for comment and will update this story with any response. The company is due to report its Q3 2012 financials on Wednesday.
Earlier this month Ancestry.com bought print photograph digitizing startup 1000memories, and also recently acquired competitor Archives.com for $100 million. It has more than two million paying subscribers, and grew its revenues from $166 million in 2007 to $399.7 million in 2011.