How a corner of Dublin is spearheading the new social age of online advertising

John Kennedy
Silicon Republic
November 5th 2009

It’s evening time and I’m standing on the edge of Hanover Quay musing about the pummelling that traditional media industries have received in the past year. TV, print and radio advertising have plummeted and these industries are rushing to reinvent themselves at a time when fewer people watch TV and even fewer people under 30 are buying newspapers.

At the offices

Behind me are the shiny new offices of social-networking phenomenon Facebook, which only a year ago had less than 100 million users and today counts 350 million users worldwide – including a quarter of the Irish population. A few hundred metres in front of me on the other side of the canal estuary are the colourful offices of search giant Google.

Both companies are emerging as the two major power brokers in the online advertising world and it’s curious how a tiny area of Dublin is home to their international ad sales operations.

In recent weeks, Google reported a 7pc increase in third-quarter revenues of $5.94 billion, prompting a confident CEO, Eric Schmidt, to say the worst of the recession is behind the company. Meanwhile, Facebook, which was spawned in a Harvard dorm in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, is estimated to have made revenues of $300 million last year. In September, it declared itself cash-flow positive for the first time.

It started with girls

Zuckerberg created Facebook as a way of comparing girls on Harvard’s campus after he hacked the university’s servers. The first iteration of the social-networking phenomenon, ‘Facemash’, got inadvertently leaked across campus and soon Zuckerberg faced expulsion and charges of violating copyright and privacy laws.

Luckily, the charges were dropped and today Facebook is a social hub for millions of people to micro-blog, email, share pictures and videos and play games. The social glue of Facebook has resulted in it becoming a major draw for advertisers, media brands, charities and micro-businesses to reach an audience in the context of trust. In recent months, Facebook acquired FriendFeed and will soon appear in living-rooms via the Microsoft Xbox.

Late last year, it emerged that Facebook was hunting for an office in Dublin and it also transpired that it would be hiring 70 workers to drive its EMEA operations. Last week, at the opening of its new base on Hanover Quay, Facebook announced plans to hire a further 70 people across several functions, including user and online operations, advertising sales, advertising campaign delivery, legal, finance and engineering.

Eight billion minutes

Heading up the EMEA division is the director of online operations, Colm Long, who revealed that, globally, eight billion minutes are spent on Facebook every day and two billion pieces of content are shared on the site every week. “We now have tens of thousands of advertisers using our ads system and that has tripled in recent months.”

Facebook’s location in Dublin is no accident. Chief operations officer Sheryl Sandberg, in a previous role with Google, had such a positive experience with the city that when the opportunity came to open an international office, there was nowhere else she would consider.

Long explained: “Ireland has proven invaluable to Facebook and as a result we’ll be ending this year with double the workforce we thought we’d have. Top of mind for us is access to talent. Not just the indigenous talent that comes from a high-quality education system, but also the fact that, despite all the doom and gloom, people from overseas are willing to locate here. There’s no hard sell.

“It’s also about the ease of doing business here. Ireland is extremely well networked with a great small-business community.”

Accessing talent

IDA Ireland’s chief executive, Barry O’Leary, said access to talent exceeds corporation tax as a reason for companies, such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, to expand here, but warned it is vital we increase the availability of technology in the Irish education system.