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Comment by zaius | Hacker News Reader

From a couple months ago, their estimated revenues for 2011 are $1.8 billion [1]. This is a completely different beast to linked in. I'm very interested in seeing how it goes.

[1] http://blogs.forbes.com/afontevecchia/2011/03/02/zynga-revea...

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I smell something; maybe it's the smell of freshly cooked books? That article raises some questions for me in the context of Zynga (which, I'm pretty sure, has for its motto: "Evil is fine, as long as it pays."). Why would a company with $630 million in profits need to raise $500 million? Where is the revenue really coming from (maybe tit-for-tat deals like the ones Enron made to make profits look huge)? How will they sustain that revenue?

Zynga is mostly a modern spammer, as far as I can tell, and the spam business is a constant arms race. They can't win it forever, unless facebook remains mostly complicit in the process (which would hurt facebook in the long run, even if it is profitable for them in the short run).

So, I'd believe that Zynga is making money, even a lot of money, but I have a hard time believing they can sustain that level of profitability as people's tolerance for facebook spam declines. And, I have a really hard time believing those specific numbers. I guess there really is a lot of money in stupid.

I 'd actually bet their profitability is even higher than that. You have no idea how much revenue these games generate, and we 're talking about massive user base. Just consider the fact that they have foregone display advertising in their apps - which should be a huge extra pile of cash. They really hit a gold vein.

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