Mark Zuckerberg Teams Up With Bill Gates for Charity

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is seems to be a nice guy. He and some of his nerdy mates have pledged to give all their vast fortunes away to noble causes either during their lifetimes or after their death.

Most likely this is so we all forget all the data and privacy problems Facebook has been plagued with recently, plus the way Zuckerberg was portrayed as the world’s biggest bell-end in David Fincher’s film, The Social Network.

Bill Gates, the lord of the geeks and former one man bank came up with the scheme to get the obscenely wealthy to say they’ll give their billions away at some point down the line to benefit the less fortunate, with his wife Melinda and some fella named Warren Buffett.

As you would expect, the news that Mark Zuckerberg is pledging to give all his cash away to the needy isn’t something you’d traditionally expect people to take the mickey out of, but we aren’t a traditional blog.

Zuckerberg recently rolled out a new Facebook page design, which for once didn’t result in all 500 million members joining groups called, “GET FACEBOOK TO CHANGE BACK, THE NEW LAYOUT IS CRAP!!!11ONE112!” He’s also been on a bit of a PR trail following the release of The Social Network, doing more interviews and public appearances, portraying himself as just a nice guy, albeit a nice guy whose bank statements has more zeros than a list of X-Factor contestants.

Now, we’re not suggesting that Zuckerberg is resorting to the cheap tactic of making a sizable charity donation in order to raise his public profile. But let’s face it, he probably is.

Facebook Hauled in a Record $2 Billion This Year

Insiders tell Bloomberg that Facebook is on track to generate a whopping $2 billion in revenues in 2010. The figure smashes the company's own expectations and is more than double what the company hauled last year, a reported $700 to $800 million. According to Bloomberg, the social network's swelling userbase has become irresistible to big-name advertisers including Adidas, JPMorgan Chase and Coca-Cola. Here's how bloggers are explaining the company's success:

Display Advertising "Facebook is making gains in so-called display ads--the banners, videos and other graphical promotions that appear on websites, reports Brian Womack at Bloomberg. "It may grab about 9.4 percent of that market in the U.S. this year, up from 6.6 percent in 2009."


Games : "The blockbuster success of casual games from studios such as Zynga add up to more coin in Facebook's coffers when users pay with Facebook Credits; for every dollar the user spends on Facebook Credits, the social network gets 30 cents."

Did Facebook Purposefully Lower Expectations? "The social network may be employing a tactic more common among publicly held companies: Set lower expectations of revenues or earnings so that you can beat them and then impress investors," writes Jackie Cohen at All Facebook. "This might make more sense given how hot the company’s shares are on SecondMarket."

This Is Just the Beginning "Once Facebook has a true web-wide view their scale becomes completely un-ignorable by all major advertisers," writes David Pakman at Ad Age. "They are already at this point today in many markets, but this will become true next year in essentially all online geographic markets." Pakman argues that with a payments system and a social ad network, Facebook will eventually reach $20 billion in revenue. Even more optimistic than Pakman is Wedbush analyst Lou Kerner who thinks Facebook could be worth $200 billion by 2015. He explains himself on Bloomberg TV: