The fine folks over at the Next Web recently published a guest post by me that examines Facebook’s share price roller coaster since they went public. And a pretty boring roller coaster it is, because since their single precipitous drop early on, they’ve been more or less climbing ever since.

The two main reasons why Facebook has continually grown in value are the monetization of the news feed and their success at advertising to the growing percentage of users who access Facebook on mobile devices. In our guest post, we examine the underlying reason behind these two successes. Driven by the introduction of Facebook Exchange, advertisers can now place their ads in front of people who have shown affinity for their products or services outside of Facebook, a process known as retargeting.

There’s lots more detail in the post itself, including an interactive graph showing the events that led to rises and falls in the share price. As the title suggests, the common thread that unites their gains is access to data.