Recode: Sorry Facebook, You Are A Media Company

There is a stigma associated with investing in media companies. Investors don't like the sound of it and a company's best and brightest minds would prefer working at a technology company, such as Facebook Inc FB.

There's one issue here: According to Recode, Facebook is very much a media company and less so a technology company.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that it's not and will not become a media company.

Recode argued that whenever a company's main business is to "gather people's attention" and then sell that attention to advertisers, then it's a media company.

And few companies, if any, are better than Facebook at attracting consumer attention and monetizing it with advertisers.

For instance, back in the second quarter of 2012, Facebook's advertising revenue was just $992 million. Fast forward four full fiscal years and Facebook's advertising revenue soared to $6.24 billion.

"Frankly, it makes us more than a little jealous that you're so good at being a media company while insisting you're not a media company," Recode added.

Facebook's dominance in the media landscape is even more impressive when considering that users upload their own content so it's technically free on Facebook's end.

Finally, Recode noted that between Facebook and Google, another company that argues it isn't in the media business, the two "technology" companies account for billions of dollars of advertising per quarter.