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What were you doing three years ago?
If you are Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg or other members of Facebook’s inner circle, you spent the morning at your Menlo Park headquarters, high-fiving over your IPO. Then you spent the rest of the day in a funk, as everything went wrong and Facebook stock barely cleared your $38 offering price.
And things didn’t get better for more than a year: Anyone who bought Facebook stock on the day it went public was underwater until the summer of 2013, when the stock suddenly started shooting up again.
The reason: Facebook was able to argue, convincingly, that it had figured out how to make money from its mobile users. By the middle of 2013, mobile ads, which had been a goose egg when Facebook IPOed, made up 41 percent of the company’s ad revenue (it’s at more than 70 percent now).
Things have been very, very good for Facebook investors since then. If you held the stock you bought on IPO day, you’re now up more than 100 percent:
If you’d like to draw a moral here, I’d be wary, since it’s always possible that Facebook’s stock chart doesn’t continue its ascent. Perhaps, for instance, the market for app install ads, which have been a big driver for Facebook’s mobile business, ends up retreating. What happens to Facebook’s story then?
Then again, it’s worth noting that Facebook’s stock price and ad revenues aren’t the only things that have shot up in the last three years. The company’s user base, which everyone assumed would be plateauing in 2012, has added 500 million users since then, and now sits at 1.44 billion. That seems as astonishing as any other part of Facebook’s recent history.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
