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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Revenue is not a good comparison, e.g. Ford has much higher revenue than Apple. Net retained earnings [profit] is what matters and that is unreported because Facebook is a private company.

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Apple made $16.64 billion profit in 2010, how much profit do you think, if any, Facebook made on their $1-2 billion?

well, since the valuation of FB is clearly a random smoke and mirrors number...I'd say FB made between $300-400 billion on their $1-2 billion.

They say they're profitable, but if the profits were impressive, they'd probably publicize them more (obviously not in explicit terms, but they'd describe the scope - i.e "8 digits"). Random guess, $40 million.

To play devil's advocate, the relevant number is expected future earnings, not current ones: at a 0.95 discount rate, $75 billion amounts to an income stream of $3.75 billion a year. Clearly they're not making that now, but: 1) there's a good chance that they will have far richer data, and therefore the ability to target ads better and more profitably, than google 2) there's a nonzero chance that they will be able to monetize micropayments in a far bigger way than paypal ever did.

There are plenty of other potential revenue streams, but these two alone make the valuation seem like not so much of a stretch — they might just be a $20b company, but then again, they could conceivably end up being a $200b company.

Not enough to justify the recent valuation.

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