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Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

“We’ve worked hard to bring more than 200 million people – 70 percent outside of the U.S. – onto Facebook to share with friends, family and co-workers."

70% outside the U.S? Yikes. So that means 70% of it's users cannot be monetized. Good show Zuckerberg...what do you have up your sleeves...

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Yeah, no startups anywhere else in the world are monetizing their users.

We do monetize our users directly, 99% of them don't come from US. And I have to tell you the truth: it's incredibly difficult to sell to ppl in US. If you cannot provide $10 support for every dollar you take from your US customer he/she will not buy it and will request immediate refund. With such an attitude, we do prefer to reject payments made using US credit cards/paypal accounts to save our time and money. C'est la vie.

> 70% outside the U.S? Yikes. So that means 70% of it's users cannot be monetized.

How did you come to this conclusion.

I think the logic may have gone like this:

"If it ain't got no dead president on it then it ain't no damn money!"

I like to avoid giving credence to any negative stereotypes of Americans, but sometimes the internet makes that so very, very hard.

It's been primarily speculative, but many people have suggested that Facebook's Ad platform works because American companies can easily target Americans because they know something about the market they're trying to hit.

I'm probably wrong in my assumptions, but I would think it would be pretty difficult for some targeted ads to work in foreign countries. I don't have a bias or anything, I'm just summarizing the feeling I've gotten from reading numerous reports online.

Here's a thread about how Facebook's costs are growing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=445630

> I'm probably wrong in my assumptions, but I would think it would be pretty difficult for some targeted ads to work in foreign countries.

How so? Why wouldn't say Spanish advertisers want to show ads to Spanish Facebook users any less than American advertisers would want to show their ads to Americans?

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