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Comment by tdm911 | Hacker News Reader

Oh yeah, and they are already making gazillions of dollars and are profitable.

Didn't Facebook only achieve profitability a month or so ago? Or have I missed something?

This was pre-Photos app, which is what took off like a rocket and blew out their hosting and bandwidth costs. They were profitable before Photos.

Really? Did photos set them under? Almost all FB photos are low resolution compared with the 10MP ones I throw on Flickr and get much less traffic in my estimate.

I believe you, but its amazing that bandwidth costs for photos could set them under for such a long time.

Facebook has more users than Flickr; its users upload more photos than Flickr's.

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/23/facebook-increases-...

They get more than twice the photo traffic Flickr does. It's also interesting, looking at that second graph and realizing that Facebook hasn't peaked yet. Did you know that according to Compete Facebook is visited nearly as much as Yahoo and Google? Or that it's got 250% the traffic of MySpace?

Can they not be profitable for a bit and then invest a bunch until they become profitable again?

Absolutely, I was under the impression that they had for the first time.

Also, were they really making enough money in 2005 for it to be described as 'gazillions'?

They just went cash flow positive about a month ago:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/facebook-crosses-300-mi...

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