Deborah Liu has nurtured the social network’s Mobile App Install Ad product from concept to hundreds of millions of dollars in estimated annual revenue.
Facebook director of product management for monetization Deborah Liu speaking at a keynote at the Money 2020 conference last year in Las Vegas.
The flora around Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters was wreaking major havoc with Deborah Liu's allergies. The leader of one of Facebook's most important new businesses was without her medication, and as a result the thumping in her head had less to do with the salsa company offering a promotion to employees gathered for lunch in the courtyard and more to do with her sinuses.
But Liu, dressed noticeably more professionally than her colleagues in black pants and a black blazer, isn't the type of person to let some sniffling get her down. Indeed, as the head of Facebook's Mobile App Install Advertising product, Liu has been smiling wider than most lately. That's because app install ads, which Facebook launched in October 2012, have become one of the company's fastest-growing and most lucrative new businesses.
The number of installs served through Facebook's Mobile App Install ads grew to 245 million at the end of the year from 145 million at the beginning of October, Liu told BuzzFeed in an interview — with about 100 million installs happening in the span of the past few months. In October when the first install number came out, Macquarie's Ben Schacter estimated the segment was already hitting an annual run rate in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and upped his price target at the time on the strength of that advertising business. In a short span of time, the business has quickly emerged as a go-to method for developers to find new users.
Hints of the product's potential first emerged last summer. As the revenue potential grew, so did Liu's team, as she and her partner, Facebook technical engineering lead Vijaye Raji, brought in people from Facebook's core ads division and added engineers to a team in Seattle specific to building out the App Install product.
Facebook isn't the first company to experiment with advertisements for installing apps from Google Play and the Apple App Store. There are competitors like larger firms such as Millenial Media, and smaller firms like Flurry, which raised an additional $12.5 million in December and has raised more than $60 million overall. The presence of Facebook as a competitor didn't necessarily kill the growth of some of these companies, but it did slow them down, according to one industry source.
However, even as Facebook was sort of late to the business — as it was for many of its mobile products — the sheer size of its user base and the scale at which it can ramp up an ad unit has thus far given it an edge over early app install advertisement providers, said Scott Kessler, senior equity analyst at S&P CapitalIQ.
"There's no disputing Facebook kind of had a late start both in terms of when they started to get serious about mobile, and when they started to kind of collectively move in the same direction when it came to the strategy pertaining to mobile," he said. "But the other way to look at it is, clearly, the size and the scale of the overall Facebook user base, their mobile user base, and the massive amounts of data they have collected related to every kind of action, every ad, it gives them a lot of intelligence enabling them to better craft and target and adjust advertising with partners accordingly."
Facebook has already launched several updates, including a new type of ad that enables developers to "re-engage" with users after an app has been installed.
Liu doesn't necessarily fit the traditional Silicon Valley mold. She's a seller, not a hacker — her tech career began while still an MBA student at Stanford by selling products on eBay.
"Part of me always wanted to work with small businesses, and one of the things I found as an eBay seller was that it was enabling so many people to do small business," said Liu, an avid scrapbooking fan who is known to make elaborate Photoshop calendars for her colleagues.
After graduating in 2002, she got a job with eBay's PayPal. While she was there, she was fast-tracked and within a few years was basically handling the buyer experience for all of eBay.
"She works harder and has more stamina than most people I know, she's incredibly sharp and has this kind of raw horsepower," said Amy Klement, who led PayPal's product management unit at the time and brought on Liu. "There was never anything with her that was a massive gap. She's one of those people that has no fatal flaws."
As one of the key people leading the integration of PayPal into eBay, Liu quickly demonstrated an ability for navigating the complicated relationship that the two companies initially had as they became more closely tied together — on both a product and personality level.
"eBay had all these needs and wants from us and we had our own needs and wants, and she was really masterful at kind of navigating differing priorities of things," Klement said.
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