Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users and is Cash Flow Positive
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Cash flow positive at any point in time, even sustained for a few quarters, does not equate to "profitable". They have raised almost a quarter billion dollars. Their investors would likely want a multi-billion dollar equity event out of this, if that were even possible.
Facebook has become very deft at public relations in the last few years. Things like the "$15B USD Valuation" spin when Microsoft bought some ads are one example. I am very hesitant to believe that this announcement is anything more than PR based off of something like "well, if you look at the numbers just right at a point in time we can claim to be CFP...".
Those are very important financial points. It seems to me that the real estate business in the United States was largely cash-flow positive as recently as three years ago, three years after I was sure that it was all a bubble.
Congratulations indeed, what an amazing scaling success story. Every statistic I read about them is staggering.
Yeah...that knife cuts both ways, doesn't it?
1. Ivy League beginnings. It was easy to scrape together an audience due to the Ivy league exclusivity at the beginning. This solved the chicken and egg problem in a field dominated by MySpace, LJ, Friendster, Xanga, et al.
2. Harvard background: its easier to raise funding just because of the name.
3. MySpace's utter lack of progress especially by the time it was bought out by Murdoch.
While this was indeed an "incredible" thing, the question is, did this help make Facebook what it is today, or even attract a sizable audience?
The answer is most resoundingly no. Facebook was already very popular by the time most of these unique things were made, and in the case of Facebook apps, it even put off some users who were annoyed by its spammy nature.
The pattern is simple, a new site shows up that let's you exchange info with people you have not talked to in a while. So you sign up and chat for a while, but you don't really care about those people so after a while going to the site becomes an annoying time sink and so you drop it. For a site that just has your core friends. But then you don't talk to people for a while and...
The only long term niche is to become the psudo holiday site, where people occupationally show up to chat with their extended social graph, but you don't really spend much time there. So, lot's of people, few page views.
PS: The people that "love" social sites and want to keep up with all their friends will jump ship as soon as something else becomes popular with most of their friends.
What makes Facebook different, in short, is that while other services offer a place to talk, Facebook is built as a utility in a way other sites aren't. It's the new big communication medium. The people that use it are using it as a replacement to email and IM. That's a huge deal, because it suggests Facebook has the potential to last as long as email has.
Your suggestion that people abandon things all the time is countered by AIM, which has been the prominent IM service for a decade.
If facebook is how office drinks get organised, you need ot be in on that. (size doesn't matter so much for that though)
Awesome achievement.
At that point in time, Facebook's networking features were equivalent to Myspace and Friendster, and still is today for the most part aside from some fancy bells and whistles.
The only way you could break into the market was to find a niche, and the Ivy league exclusivity at the beginning was that niche. Facebook was not a pioneer in this field as evidenced by sites such as ConnectU and Orkut.
Doing so requires other startups! twitpic twitvid bit.ly etc etc
Startups, to add features to twitter that should already be there :/ madness I tell you.
(Yes, I know, plain text emails to hotmail/gmail recipients would probably be just as bad as plain text private messaging on facebook. Protecting privacy is so bothersome that my efforts are pretty token. But I do try... because I don't comprehend the ramifications of releasing so much information.)
Facebook is not for communicate with a people in next block. It for links between countries and cultures (excuse me for this pathos =).
Active = logs in once a week?
That's an interesting statement. Is there any way of independently verifying this? And is there any way of independently verifying churn of Facebook users who give up being active users by anyone's definition?
As above, I find this to be an interesting statement, and I wonder how it could be verified. Is there a way for anyone outside of Facebook to identify unique users who post content in the most recent month? What means exist to check how many former Facebook users give up using Facebook?
Well, why does anyone care in the first place?
Jeez, think of all of the valuable things that time could be used for instead of "looking at picture of people I don't know, but did go to high school with". sigh
Never underestimate the "value" of "entertainment", especially on the internet.
How does that figure of about one minute per day for the worldwide population compare to time spent on such activities as talking on a voice telephone or watching television or World Wide Web use as a whole?
If we define fad as "something that exists, becomes engrained as 'the way' or a 'hot item' in the vernacular for a period of time, then fades away" everything is a fad. IBM still exists, but their fad period is over. The same goes for AOL.
The services may not be fads, but their periods of rampant popularity are. All the talk and attention will fade when people discover the next big thing to coddle their self esteem and egos.