The overall technology market has already entered the new phase of its development - and this phase will benefit mostly the customers. Under the customers here I mean usual people that surfing internet everyday. We are slightly moving from the small subscription fee to absolutely free data and tools that can be used in every day life. Facebook is an absolutely game-changing company right now, because it knows too much about all of us than almost anyone does. The way of monetizing this data is the most important part of Facebook's business. There are several reasons why I think that long-term investors should have this stock in their portfolio. 1. WhatsApp / Instagram Recently Facebook announced that it will not charge $1 subscription fee. WhatsApp will start sharing data with Facebook. That's all the needed to do when they acquired this app. Will Facebook get the information from WhatsApp besides the messages and some keywords? I am pretty sure, no. Just take a look at your WhatsApp profile - there is no information about you besides the general information that Facebook already has. That's why I assume that Facebook will use this opportunity to read the conversation, however I am not sure right now how they are going to do it without breaching personal conversations. Instagram's sponsored ads will contribute the huge part of Facebook's revenue over the next several years. According to different estimation, last year Instagram received more than 3.7% of total Facebook's revenue which is around $660M. I am pretty sure that they will have a significant increase this year. 2. FB registration button This button will benefit both content creators and Facebook. Content creators / websites / apps will get the information that they can monetize through the advertising, Facebook can get more information about their users, create customers patterns, analyze huge amount of data and increase their advertising revenue significantly by segmenting their users. According to Datanyze, more than 1.5B websites are using Facebook comments and I assume that even more websites use the Facebook registration button. 3. Information consumption Facebook has all the chances to become the most influential website where people consume all the information instead of reading different media sources. Right now scrolling the feed on Facebook we can get more valuable information than going to any other website. Still there are number of ways to develop the overall platform and the way how users can consume more information from one website. Recent Facebook announcement about their video views is also really interesting. Most of analysts started crying that all these numbers are fake, but I think that they just don't want to get with obvious fact - Facebook video is going to grow. The management decision on starting the video when you just see it in your feed is genius. As for me, I personally started watching more videos on Facebook than anywhere else. If their interface becomes user-friendly in terms os searching different videos, then I think they can compete with Youtube. 4. Instant purchases From this part Facebook can start benefit in very close future. Just imagine that you just found the sneakers that you want to buy right now. Instead of clicking the links, instead of filling all the information on the retailer's websites, you'll just click "buy" button on Facebook and get your sneakers. Sounds very simple, doesn't it? In 2012 Facebook acquired Karma Science that was one of the first companies on the loyalty marketing field. Everybody thought that it could somehow help Facebook start getting money from e-commerce services (basically lead generation). 2 years after the deal, in July 2014, Facebook announced that the company is going to shut down its gift business. Facebook started working on this "buy" button even earlier and I think when it comes up in a feed, it will boom their sales. Short summary Facebook has the most important data for monetization. Basically Facebook has all the data about the end-consumers, that's the most important source of revenue and it will be constantly increasing their financials and market capitalization over the next several years. Facebook = Data = Money. As for me, Facebook stock is a long-term game where you can benefit together with Facebook business.