INTIMACY.”
That’s the first sentence of Sheryl Sandberg’s 1991 Harvard thesis. She gave the word its own paragraph to contrast how the warm feelings it evokes are horribly corrupted when violence disrupts the sanctity of a loving relationship.
The thesis is called “Economic Factors & Intimate Violence” and, despite its rifle-shot lede, is a dry-eyed, equation-laden study that painstakingly and convincingly makes an unsurprising case that financial pressure leads women to stay with abusive partners longer than they would otherwise. It’s an impressive piece of work for a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate, bearing trademarks that she would be later known for: a quiet passion for women’s rights, a deep affinity for hard work, and—here’s the twist—a belief that the most personal matters can be wrestled to the ground with logic and data. That’s the essence of Sheryl. She draws you in, helps you find the formula to solve your problem, and sends you off in time for her next meeting.
Another aspect of the thesis that would become a Sheryl trademark was the copious thanks to mentors and helpmates. In this case, the biggest bouquet in the acknowledgments fell to her thesis co-adviser, Lawrence Summers, the economics superstar who would later head the entire university.
Sandberg’s rise to the chancellor’s favor at Harvard is a fable of meritocracy. She was raised in Florida. Her mother taught English and her father was a celebrated ophthalmologist; her brother and her sister both pursued medical careers. Obviously, a high-achieving clan.
In Sandberg’s books she describes herself as the type of girl who obsessively organized things, and quotes her sister’s wedding toast: “Some of you think we are Sheryl’s younger siblings, but really we were Sheryl’s first employees,” said Michelle Sandberg. “To the best of our knowledge, Sheryl never actually played as a child but really just organized other children’s play.” Citing that remark was an act of self-deprecation, but one senses an element of hurt in the retelling. Sandberg would later lament that girls who confidently showed leadership skills would be diminished by the “bossy” epithet. She reports that as one reason that she often hid her accomplishments. (Not all: in a newspaper article about thirteen-year-old Sandberg’s activities supporting Soviet Jews, it was noted that she had attended her first rally on the issue at the age of one.)
Sandberg’s Harvard experience couldn’t have been more different from that of her future boss. She arrived in a whirlwind of enthusiasm and activity, clad in leggings, jeans miniskirt, and a Florida Gators sweatshirt. She taught aerobics classes all four years of her time there. But what others saw as a bubbly personality shrouded a need to excel—and a lack of inner confidence that drove her to work twice as hard as anyone else. (She would later write of forcing herself to smile for an hour even during sessions when she wasn’t feeling great.) She struggled during her freshman year, finding herself ill prepared for a course on “The Hero in Hellenic Civilization,” as she was unfamiliar with the Iliad and the Odyssey, two works that Mark Zuckerberg bonded with in his prep school. In one political-science class she was assigned a five-page paper, longer than the ones she had written in high school. She labored for days at it and was crushed when the instructor gave her a C, which at grade-inflated Harvard is virtually equivalent to an F. “I buckled down, worked harder and by the end of the semester, I learned how to write five-page papers,” she later told her readers. It was a strategy that characterized Sandberg’s later approach to the workplace: with sufficient preparation and diligence, one could always bag the A+. Even the most intransigent problem could be defeated with hard work.
After graduating, she took that attitude into the workplace, first doing a stint at the World Bank, then led by Summers, focusing on its efforts to address diseases and other problems of developing nations. (She met Bono there.) Then back to Harvard for an MBA. Following that, for a brief period, McKinsey, because that’s what Harvard MBAs did in the early ’90s. When President Bill Clinton appointed Summers to the Treasury in 1995, Sandberg’s mentor asked her to be his chief of staff. “Sheryl always believed that if there were thirty things on her to-do list at the beginning of the day, there would be thirty check marks at the end of the day,” Summers would later tell The New Yorker. After the Clinton administration ended, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whom she’d met while studying the concept of Internet taxes, kept calling her. “Sheryl, we’re profitable,” he’d say, sharing information that few in the Valley knew or understood. “You should join.” She wasn’t sure what her role would be, but Schmidt said it didn’t matter. “All that matters is how quickly the company is growing,” he said. “This is a rocket ship—get on it.”
“And I went home and I thought to myself, That’s exactly right,” she says. “And I joined.” Later she would offer the same advice to others pondering a break to Silicon Valley: Get on the rocket ship. “It’s all about fast growth,” she’d say.
She eventually wound up in the sales organization at Google, which struck some people as odd. “This is a job for a tractor,” said her boss Omid Kordestani. “You’re a Porsche.” But Sandberg understood that Google was pioneering digital advertising at scale. It was just about to launch its AdWords search advertising product, which would become one of the most successful products in history. “I really believed that was the future of the business,” she says. She was fine being a tractor in that effort, building an organization, changing the nature of ad sales from schmoozing to analytics.
Sandberg was never one of the people you would hear talking about “Don’t Be Evil” or any of that stuff. She once remarked that, in her observation, a company’s beliefs were the opposite of its mantras. “My attitude has always been that you’d better keep your head down and do your work,” she once told me. “I delivered my numbers and focused on my metrics.”
But by the end of 2007, it was time to leave Google. She knew that the CEO-in-waiting was co-founder Larry Page, and she wasn’t tapped to replace Kordestani as head of the entire business side. Don Graham, CEO of the Washington Post Company, had tried to hire her after her Treasury stint, and was offering her the top job in his corporation. But Sandberg was now married to an entrepreneur named David Goldberg, whose steady demeanor was the perfect foil to her high-strung approach to business and life. Graham had to admit that Washington did not offer the opportunities for Goldberg that California did. (Goldberg would soon get an offer to head a young company in Palo Alto called SurveyMonkey.) Sandberg then surprised Graham. “Tell me about Mark,” she said.
Sandberg was already on the short list of COO candidates when she first met Mark Zuckerberg at a holiday party at former Yahoo! exec Dan Rosensweig’s house. (Ironic, since Rosensweig was also on the candidate list.) They made arrangements for a longer conversation at the Flea Street café in Menlo Park, a farm-to-table haven for Bay Area foodies that Sandberg adored. They found plenty to talk about. They were so deep in discussion—Zuckerberg going on about the mission and what he needed to accomplish it—they closed the place down, and moved the conversation to Sandberg’s place, until she finally sent him home. “I have kids!” she would later recount to Oprah about the conversation. “My kids were getting up in five hours!”
As the recruitment heated up, Sandberg spoke about the Facebook interest with Roger McNamee, who instinctively felt that Zuckerberg—who grew up in a family dominated by females—could handle advice from a woman older than him. Sandberg, says McNamee, was worried that Zuckerberg was too young to be her boss. (Sandberg now downplays the McNamee connection, saying that he cluelessly advised her to take the Post job. She also disputes his claim that she was worried about Zuckerberg’s age.)
The discussions continued through January and February. Zuckerberg showed her around the offices, which by then had been spread over multiple locations in downtown Palo Alto. When he asked her what she thought, she intuited that he expected her to remark how cool it was. Instead she told him it was absurd to have to walk around to all those different places. “Get yourselves into one building,” she told him. (A year later, Facebook would largely consolidate in a single building in a different part of Palo Alto.)
During the months of conversation with Zuckerberg leading up to her job offer, the two discussed everything about the company, but one negotiation in particular would set Facebook’s structure for the next decade and beyond: what parts of the company Sandberg would be responsible for and what parts would be excluded from her reporting chain. Zuckerberg felt that Sandberg should basically take on the things that he wasn’t so interested in—sales, policy, communications, lobbying, legal, and anything else with a low geek quotient. His own time would be best spent on product—the stuff that engineers build. That’s what defined Facebook. This was basically how he’d dealt with the previous executives like Parker, Van Natta, and Palihapitiya, and even though Sandberg would have higher status than any of them, he hadn’t changed his mind on that. Sandberg’s role was to explicitly “take a bunch of stuff off Mark’s plate,” she recalls. “It was very easy—he took product and I took the rest.”
Since Sandberg didn’t consider herself a “product person” but was obviously experienced in business, that split made sense. And Sandberg believed that through their discussions, Zuckerberg came to understand how important an augmented business model was to Facebook. But the split would result in some odd bifurcation. The engineers creating ad products—like new kinds of advertisements that might live in the News Feed—reported up to Zuckerberg in an entirely different organization from those who sold ads. Sales was Sheryl country. And the people building the News Feed itself would report to Zuckerberg, while those who would be responsible for the policy decisions of what would be appropriate content to appear on people’s feeds would be working for Sandberg.
Ultimately, of course, all the responsibility fell to Zuckerberg. “Everything that reports to me reports to him because I report to him,” Sandberg says. “So [the division of labor determined] just what I was going to work on.”
Still, for the next decade of mega-growth, as the company faced unprecedented issues because of its mind-boggling scale, Facebook essentially had two organizations: Zuckerberg’s domain and Sheryl World. And in no way were those equal. Zuckerberg headed engineering, the product side, not only because he was better at it but because he felt it was the heart of the company.
Still, it seemed like a no-brainer at the time. It would take him more than a decade to understand what a mistake it was.
Sandberg’s key focus would be taking the company’s nascent approach toward monetizing and eventually making Facebook profitable, preferably wildly profitable in the mode of her former employer. But because of Zuckerberg’s inexperience, her role was much broader. She would be Facebook’s operating officer. She made sure that an explicit job was helping Zuckerberg scale Facebook into a major corporation. “A thriving business was part of that, but it wasn’t the only thing,” she says.
But she did have firm ideas about business from the get-go. On her first day she attended the mandatory new-employee boot camp and listened to the standard inspirational speech delivered by Chris Cox, a tribute to Facebook’s lofty mission that was becoming a legendary part of company culture. But then she flouted orientation protocol by making her own speech. She explained to the astonished newbies that there was an inverted pyramid of advertising, and to date her former employer, Google, had dominated the bottom by monetizing intent (as people did searches). But Facebook, she said, would have an even bigger business, because it had the potential to create and monetize demand. That was the much wider top of the inverted pyramid. People come every day to Facebook to learn what’s new and share their interests. So advertisers would be able to sell to Facebook users things that they wanted even before they thought to ask for them.
She and Zuckerberg agreed to meet at the beginning and end of the week, every week. They began to work out what would become a close relationship. In one of the first meetings of the executive team Sandberg attended, she went on about the number scale that recruiters should use while rating candidates (the only proper scale is 1 to 5, she insisted). Zuckerberg rolled his eyes. After the meeting he profusely apologized and said he’d never undercut her like that again.
Sandberg set about meeting everyone she could, learning about Facebook’s structure, asking how people hired, what the culture was. But she also dove deep into the rabbit hole of her young boss’s psyche, quizzing people who knew him well. She had seen how well Eric Schmidt had handled the youthful founders of Google, never once saying publicly they were anything but geniuses. “I gave her a copy of Ender’s Game, and said, Read to this to understand Mark,” says Joe Green. (The protagonist is a teenager who saves the world when it turns out the war game he trains on is the real thing.) Though she might occasionally give an eye roll of her own to a friend when talking about this or that Zuckerberg-ism, in public she spoke rhapsodically of the partnership.
Zuckerberg’s previous adjutants—Parker, Van Natta, and Palihapitiya—had all been masters of chaos who let their boss’s bro-tastic move-fast ethos run loose not just in releasing products but in the management style of the company itself. Sandberg instantly put a stop to that. She was like Wendy parachuting onto the island of Lost Boys. Early in her tenure, she invited all the key women employees to her house for a cocktail party. (There was no problem fitting them into one room.) She let them know that the bro era was over. As she had at Google, Sandberg would reach out to young women at the company and in the course of a tightly scheduled one-on-one, ask about personal issues, offer advice, and pledge that she’d watch out for them. She joined several women’s groups at Facebook. She hosted Gloria Steinem at her house to meet Facebook women.
Dave Morin remembers one instance early in Sandberg’s tenure when a problem emerged and instead of having the rank and file cope with rumors about what Zuckerberg and his inner circle was thinking, she gathered the teams together and had people sit on the floor and talk about it. “A lot of us were kids and didn’t know how to manage people and didn’t have the skill sets to do nuanced communication,” says Morin. “She put that stuff in place and brought a level of maturity.”
By and large people saw her as the perfect complement to Zuckerberg. “She was everything Mark wasn’t,” says Ezra Callahan. “She was diplomatic, she was eloquent, she was relatable. She could make all parts of the company feel like they mattered, whereas Mark increasingly was making clear that product engineering runs the show, and the rest of you should shut up and do your jobs. It took us from feeling like this is a billion-dollar company that’s going to shoot itself in the foot one too many times to, Okay this is going to happen now.”
Not long after Sandberg arrived, Zuckerberg took his first long vacation since he’d started Thefacebook. It was a trip around the globe, lasting more than a month. “Once Sheryl was on board I felt I could do that, and I also wanted to give her time to ramp up,” he says. He packed light and went alone, visiting some friends at various locations. He started in Europe and continued east. One destination was a remote Indian ashram. The trip was compelling in part because it was the same ashram that Steve Jobs had been to before he started Apple.
Zuckerberg’s travels were rugged, with the same highs and lows that any twenty-four-year-old might experience on a solo trip abroad. He went to Berlin, Helsinki, and Katmandu. He tried to go to Russia but was unable to get a visa. He got sick trekking in Nepal; locals tried to cure him with yak milk, with little success.
The visit to the ashram didn’t wind up providing any flashes of enlightenment, though it was extended when a storm hit and what was planned as a single night became several. He spent the time “writing and meditating.” His mind was never really off Facebook, though, as the journal he kept brimmed with ideas he might execute on his return. “I remember spending a lot of time thinking about how people communicate and how groups of people can feel and act together as one,” he says. “It definitely strengthened my belief in our mission—which focused on making the world open and connected.”
That insight would later result in another trip to India. The trappings would be luxurious, an entourage would accompany him, and he would be both greeted as a role model and attacked as a colonialist forcing Facebook on the country’s 1 billion people. But that was years away.
WHILE ZUCKERBERG WAS globe-trotting, Sandberg used his absence to gain consensus on Facebook’s business model. She didn’t have to start from scratch. Despite the total botch of Beacon, the rest of the Pandemic launch—Pages, targeting, and cost-per-click ads—was already working. “We were on a $500 million run rate,” says Tim Kendall, who still headed monetization, and was now happily on Sandberg’s team. (He would remain at that post for two more years, before he left to join Pinterest and eventually become its president.) Helping Facebook even more were the terms it had negotiated with Microsoft, which guaranteed a certain amount of revenues. “It gave us air cover,” says Mark Rabkin, who headed ad engineering. When Facebook didn’t have an ad to place through its system, Microsoft would serve one through its inventory, often at a higher rate than Facebook was able to get at that point. On the couple of occasions where Facebook’s ad servers crashed, revenues would actually rise. “We would do the full postmortem and find we made an extra $50,000, because when our system was down, we would just hand it all over to the Microsoft system and they were paying a higher guaranteed minimum,” says Rabkin. (After several months, Facebook advertisers were paying higher rates, so that circumstance no longer applied, even before the Microsoft deal’s sunset in 2009.)
It was obvious to Sandberg that Facebook’s business would be advertising and everything else a rounding error. But not everyone at Facebook was comfortable with the idea, especially among some of the younger people who thought that ads sucked and Facebook should do something less . . . smarmy. Even Zuckerberg wasn’t all in—after the Pandemic event that fall Rabkin told him that he needed to hire more people. Five engineers were way too little to scale into a billion-dollar system. Google had four hundred! “Well, how many do you think you’ll need to build the best system in the world?” asked Zuckerberg. Rabkin mustered up his courage and said . . . twenty. “It seems like a lot—let me think about it,” said Zuckerberg. Rabkin says it took a couple more years before he had twenty engineers on his ad product team. (Today there are hundreds, just like Google.)
Sandberg scheduled a series of meetings with a cross-section of key employees on Tuesday or Wednesday nights, and went through the exercise of exploring how Facebook might possibly build a huge business on revenue other than advertising. WHAT BUSINESS ARE WE IN? she’d write on the whiteboard. Charge users? Do research? Everything was examined, and all found wanting—except advertising. Which was exactly where she wanted to go. “I thought at the time it was a pointless exercise,” says Kendall. “But in retrospect it was brilliant, in getting buy-in across the board.”
The group reached a consensus—Facebook would concentrate on demand, just as Sheryl had revealed on her very first day. Because Facebook knew so much information about its users, it could tell when they were prone to pitches for specific products, or even political candidates. What Facebook would not do, Sandberg vowed, was go for the quick money offered by advertisers to take over the home page with a promotion, or present outsized banner ads. (Zuckerberg had resisted this as well.) Around that time, MySpace turned over its front page to a Batman movie, followed by a promotion where the whole page went green to tout a film about the Incredible Hulk. “The concept of advertising was like the green thing was going to take over your home page,” she says. “The first meeting I had at one of the studios, this woman who was head of marketing literally screamed at me because we wouldn’t do a Hulk-like takeover for their movie and stormed out.” She wanted Facebook to do better. Ads should be good experiences, consistent with the good experience you were having on Facebook. “It wouldn’t have to be the Hulk coming out.”
Zuckerberg joined the conversation on his return, accepting the conclusions of Sandberg’s gatherings. Sandberg began building her team. Because she tapped a vast Rolodex of friends and contacts—whom she had methodically kept in touch with—Facebookers started using the term “FOSS.” Friend of Sheryl Sandberg. These included her friend Marne Levine, who would head Facebook’s DC office.
Unlike Zuckerberg, whose closest contacts consisted of “the small group”—the subset of Facebook’s leaders who were his informal advisory board—Sandberg liked an organized infrastructure of aides and lieutenants. (The larger management group was called “the M team.”) She’d have her own chief of staff, just as she’d been COS to Larry Summers.
Her most conspicuous hire was Google’s head of communications and policy, Elliot Schrage, who would assume that role at Facebook. Brandee Barker, who had been filling the top communications role, felt rebuked. But working with one of the corporate “coaches” that the consultants were providing Facebook executives, she got through it. “I had to understand that for where Facebook was going, they needed Elliot, that it had grown past what I was capable of doing,” she says. Barker found satisfaction working on product communications. Talking about the issue with Zuckerberg was never an option. “Mark doesn’t necessarily have a history of talking directly to anybody when he is ready to move on to the next person,” she says.
Sandberg’s contract with Google dictated that she could not solicit people to Facebook in her first year there. (Schrage had volunteered.) Google was already alarmed that too many of its employees were leaving for Facebook, and a few months after Sandberg started, her former bosses, Jonathan Rosenberg and Omid Kordestani, both called to discuss limiting the exodus. (According to an affidavit submitted in a case involving Google’s illegal non-poaching arrangements with other companies, Sandberg says she declined.) But after that, the floodgates opened. On the day her soliciting embargo ended, she went down a list of former colleagues she wanted with her. The dragnet bagged three executives, including Greg Badros (who had interviewed in Zuckerberg’s apartment two years earlier).
That initiative confirmed Google’s worst fears—a high-cost talent war bereft of secret no-poaching agreements. For years thereafter both companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars luring each other’s workers and retaining those who got offers from rivals.
Of course, Sandberg’s net was cast much wider than Google. She poached Microsoft’s top advertising executive, Carolyn Everson, to head sales, even though Everson had only recently taken the Microsoft job. (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was so upset that Everson took careful note of the golf club he was swinging when she gave him the news. Fortunately, “He didn’t try to hit me,” she says.)
In Everson’s interview with Zuckerberg, her prospective new boss seemed still to be wrapping his head around why companies needed brand advertising. His mother, he told Everson, always used the same shampoo. Could Facebook ads change that? Everson used the example of BMW versus Mercedes. Maybe younger people weren’t thinking of buying one, but if advertising over twenty years created a desire, they might buy one when they reached the age where consumers buy luxury cars.
When Everson took the job—she would be the person who built relationships with the top marketers at the big brands—she found that it would be harder than she expected. “It felt as though money was just flowing into Facebook and they must have everything figured out,” she says. “And when I got here we didn’t have everything figured out because everything was brand-new and we’re still building.”
Zuckerberg understood that. As always, he was focused on the long term. If Facebook was indeed going all in on advertising, “Mark knew correctly that the race to get the real product right and to internationalize the product and encourage sharing, and all of that was much more important than early monetization,” says Mark Rabkin. As always, product was his interest—what new ads should be invented now that Facebook was set on its monetization path? After the Beacon train wreck, the sponsored stories had been pulled off the News Feed—ads would not return there for years—and Facebook needed to explore other avenues. One step the company took that year was something called “engagement” ads, where an advertiser would put something on a user’s home page asking him or her to take some action—RSVP to an event, or visit the advertiser’s Facebook page.
Meanwhile, Facebook built on the foundation it had just laid. The Pages feature. Targeting. A pay-per-click auction to place ads. And then an idea emerged that would wind up augmenting the value of it, as well as having an impact on the News Feed, and extending Facebook itself into the world. The Like button.
THE FIRST STIRRINGS of the Like button came in July 2007, when News Feed was less than a year old. Code-named Props, it was an attempt to give users a way to approvingly tag stories on their feeds. Leah Pearlman, a designer on the team, had gotten the idea after a friend of hers suggested a “bomb” button to single out posts. Pearlman suggested that something be installed to indicate enthusiasm. This would mitigate what had been an obligatory necessity to respond to certain posts (new jobs, engagements, cool vacations) with congratulations or other rote kudos responses. “It was just how can we take this vast social network that we’re creating and make it as easy as possible to spread little bits of positivity and love and affirmation into the system,” says Justin Rosenstein, who conceptualized it with Pearlman. Since you couldn’t do that with zero clicks, a single click was the desired minimum. Rosenstein, as the product manager of Pages, also saw this as a way to get users engaged with those commercial efforts. “You could create advertising that was tied to someone liking a particular page, or you could advertise a page to people who liked similar pages,” says Rosenstein. So while a low-friction means of approval would obviously be helpful in ranking stories, it might have value for advertising. It could be a subtle way of helping to identify a user’s interests without the user conspicuously sharing them with Facebook.
After a flurry of emails, a working group temporarily decided to name it the Awesome button, despite that word’s association with the chaotic News Feed launch. Also under consideration: Star? Plus sign? Thumbs-up symbol? At a hackathon that summer, Rosenstein and a small team coded and designed a prototype for the Awesome button, using a star as an icon. But for various reasons progress on the project halted.
Later that year, a start-up company called FriendFeed launched. Its website had its own feed, an aggregation of all the messages and posts from the different social networks the FriendFeed user belonged to. And it had a Like button. According to an informal history of the Like button by Andrew Bosworth, Facebook ignored it. By the time Zuckerberg had decided that “awesome” didn’t strike the right tone for a feedback feature, and renamed it “like,” Facebook had purchased FriendFeed. (The prize, besides taking a potential threat to Facebook off the market, was co-founder Bret Taylor, a top-notch former Google engineer who would later become Facebook’s CTO.)
Paul Buchheit, the other FriendFeed co-founder, was amused to learn Facebook was working on a Like button, but thought it was a good idea. “I can’t definitively say that FriendFeed was where that word came from. But it’s an interesting example of the difference just a single word makes. It would be weird if it just said ‘awesome’ everywhere, right? ‘Like’ is sort of this nice word that’s lightweight and sort of meaningless. It isn’t a major commitment.”
At the same time, there was an effort by the design team to redesign how feedback worked on Facebook. The two teams merged to work on the Awesome button and got some momentum. The decision to make the actual icon a thumbs-up sprang from Facebook tradition—the Poke button was also a hand. Aaron Sittig tweaked it into the style that would become familiar to the world.
Still, it took another year and a half for Facebook to launch the Like button, in part because Zuckerberg was always lukewarm to it in product reviews. Seven Zuck reviews failed to get a thumbs-up from the CEO. One big reason was a fear that installing a one-click way to comment on a News Feed post would inhibit actual comments, and instead of interesting conversational threads there would only be a mindless accumulation of positive clicks. Bosworth referred to the Like button as a “cursed project.”
In late December 2008, product manager Jared Morgenstern inherited the Like-button albatross and tried to figure out how to lift the curse. The big hurdle was proving that a Like button would not cannibalize commenting, a much higher-quality form of sharing. He built in some tricks, like moving the cursor to the comment box after someone hit the Like button. But ultimately Facebook would only know if Likes depressed commenting by trying the button out and measuring the responses. Instead of another Zuck review, Morganstern sent an email to Zuckerberg, casually mentioning that he was going to launch the Like button in the Scandinavian countries. He interpreted Zuckerberg’s non-response as an implicit go-ahead. After giving some Nordics the use of a Like button and comparing their behavior to those who didn’t have one, Facebook’s researchers discovered that a Like button would increase commenting.
Zuckerberg ruled that the project go forward. “It’s going to be Like with a thumbs-up, just build it and ship it,” he said. “We’re done with this.”
The Like button exceeded all expectations. People took to it immediately. As originally intended, it provided a crucial signal to help rank News Feed posts. What could be a clearer indication that people liked a post than an explicit action that expressed that very sentiment? Since the goal of the News Feed was showing people what they wanted to see, Facebook’s job became easier.
But a more significant, and somewhat ominous result came when Facebook decided to expand the Like button beyond its own site and spread it to other sites of the Internet. The company essentially made a deal with the World Wide Web: if you put our Like button on your page, whatever you’re selling, promoting, or just saying in public could be boosted by implied (though unwitting) approval from millions of users. It was as if the entire web were posting to News Feed. And it was an unbelievable source of data for Facebook.
So unbelievable that it caused a minor uproar when a privacy expert named Arnold Roosendaal—at the time a doctoral candidate in the Netherlands—analyzed the data extraction and published a paper on what he found. Collecting the information when a Facebook user “liked” something on a website provided valuable information on its own. But Roosendaal found that even when users simply lit on a web page that supported likes, Facebook would plant “cookies” (which are persistent information trackers) on the visitor’s browser. What’s more, “When a user has no Facebook account, a separate set of data concerning individual browsing behavior can be created,” wrote Roosendaal. “When a user creates an account later on, the data can be connected to the newly established profile page.” Facebook called the latter issue a “bug,” and CTO Bret Taylor told a reporter that the button was not used for tracking. Still, the behavior sounded a lot like the concept of “dark profiles” outlined in Zuckerberg’s Book of Change in 2006. “What people don’t realize is that every one of these buttons is like one of those dark video cameras,” said maker of privacy software Rob Shavell to The New York Times. “If you see them, they see you.”
Aside from those privacy concerns, the Like button also had other downsides. It created a race for Likes. It was a not very subtle incentive for people to tailor what they posted to court those clicks. People would feel bad when they didn’t get Likes for posts that meant something to them. For businesses, the pursuit of Likes became a serious goal. The number of Likes their pages accumulated determined how visible they might be to Facebook’s vast audiences. If people expressed interest in their pages, advertisers could write posts that found their way to their News Feed. If a post got a lot of Likes, the News Feed algorithm would distribute it more widely, giving it “organic” traffic that went to the News Feeds of the friends of those people. It was free advertising. Many companies, including some of the world’s largest, engaged in an attention war to lure people into “liking” their pages. They sometimes offered goodies to those who gave that thumbs-up. Some pages began patronizing a black market for Likes: for a price, one could buy thousands, sometimes provided by legions of low-paid workers in China or some other nation, sitting in sweatshops, index fingers on mouse buttons, adding Likes to boost a brand.
The Like button would become a symbol of Facebook itself, with the thumbs-up icon displayed at Facebook headquarters. People would take selfies in front of the sign and post the images to social networks. Hoping, of course, that friends would “like” those photos.
So it was that the simplest of features boosted Facebook’s business, gave users an easy way to express themselves, and set the company on a disturbing course of overemphasizing trivial or angry content. Not to mention that the Like button was a gateway drug for Facebook’s data-gathering to extend beyond its borders. In recent years its founders, Rosenstein, Pearlman, and Morgenstern (none of whom work for Facebook anymore), would express, if not regret, a sober recognition that their work has been a factor in degrading society and empowering their former employer to wantonly gather data on its users. All now feel it was the right thing to do at the time, but all now wish that somehow Facebook could have gotten ahead of the unintended consequences. Which is a sentiment that could largely apply to the entire enterprise of Facebook.
In any case, the Like button’s conquest of the web was wildly successful for Facebook, and could be viewed as the revenge of Beacon. While Beacon shared personal data it received from websites with other users on Facebook, the Like button let Facebook use that data for its own purposes, largely to build its profiles of users and power its advertising. Facebook had learned that going beyond its borders to augment its monetization would be transformative. Later, Facebook would take the further step of buying information from data brokers. What was once “blasphemous” to its chief privacy officer was now Facebook’s business as usual.
What’s more, as Facebook gathered more data, much of it in real time, that data pointed to how the company could exceed even Sheryl Sandberg’s revenue expectations. From the day she arrived at Facebook, she thought that the company would be limited to advertising that created demand for a product, a huge market to be sure. But by gathering information about what people were doing on the web—what they were shopping for and fantasizing about—it could also capture the precious information involving people’s intent.
That was something advertisers would pay even more for. And it put Facebook in a much more powerful position to capture the lion’s share of online advertising revenue.
“The idea that we could move up the chain and do more intent rather than demand fulfillment . . . was pretty fundamental,” Sandberg says.
And so Facebook finally had its business model. It would require further tweaking, and a deeper dive into personal data, especially as people abandoned desktops and moved their online world to handheld devices. But as the dollars poured in, billions and billions of dollars, now drained from traditional advertising venues and into Facebook’s coffers, Mark Zuckerberg’s over-the-top introduction to Pandemic seemed less and less hyperbolic. Maybe the next hundred years of marketing history really did start with Facebook.