Ask HN: How much do I cost to Facebook?

3 pointsthatusertwo2 comments

I've been reading online that each user is worth around 4.75$ a year to Facebook. But how much does each user cost Facebook? Also are there ways that users of Facebook cause Facebook to suffer a loss for hosting their content?

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You can't put a price tag on individual users, thus it might be hard to determine when a user causes Facebook to suffer a loss just for hosting their content. See it like this: If a user blocks all advertisement, he still interacts with his friends - which is hard to value.

On the other hand - if you create an account, upload a few photo albums and don't add any friends to your account, you will probably cause a loss ;)

quarter results show that revenue is $1.058 billion, net profit (revenue-cost) is $205, = 19.38 %

revenue/user/quarter = $1.21, then cost is ~80 % = $0.97/quarter, about $3.9/year

of course, define cost per user. Total costs include marketing, pr, investments in new software and operational costs like coloc rent, power, hardware, network bandwidth, system engineering, etc.

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