A Glimpse At Facebook In Its Third Month- Early Monetization Plans

How quickly did Facebook take off? Digiday has a copy of Facebook’s first media kit, put together by Eduardo Saverin in April 2004. The company, still known as “thefacebook.com”, and limited to students of a handful of schools,Â had first launched at Harvard three months earlier, on February 4, 2004. Two additional schools were added in February(Columbia and Stanford), seven in March(Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, NYU, BU, MIT), and an additional ten by April 19. The company proclaimed that it would have 200 schools online by September.

Despite this very limited rollout, by late April, the site had 70,000 registered users, was signing up over 10,000 per week and was serving 3 million page views per day. These numbers, while impressive, would soon be dwarfed when the company decided to pivot and move away from serving just the college niche.