Facebook Advertising Efforts Face a Day of Judgement ⇥ nytimes.com

Facebook’s first earnings call since going public is on Thursday. Somini Sengupta reports for the New York Times:

“Advertisers need more proof that actual advertising on Facebook offers a return on investment,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with the market research firm eMarketer. “There is such disagreement over whether Facebook is the next big thing on the Internet or whether it’s going to fail miserably.”

Facebook’s popularity isn’t waning (not yet), but it’s hard to be the next big thing with over 900 million users. According to the ITU (PDF link), an estimated 35% of the world’s population was active on the internet 2011, or about 2.45 billion people. Facebook is so big that they’re only able to trend upwards with the growth of internet users. I think they should have gone public a few years ago.