DISQUS

VentureBeat: Facebook almost broke even last year — expect more of the same

  • MatNow · 8 months ago
    This looks like a paid post for sure. Facebook PR is working overtime to cover up their bubble like press the last few days. Fact is the pulse of the web is now focused on Twitter. Facebook is old news and boring news at that. Paid blog posts aside, it is time to move on,, the facebook fad is over.
  • Eric Eldon · 8 months ago
    What exactly are you criticizing in my article? Anything?
  • rkorba · 8 months ago
    right on, sir -- just remember to let the two hundred and fifty MILLION facebooking fad fetishists know that they are now to switch to... Twitter, was it? Ok, all clear now. thanks.
  • Tom · 8 months ago
    Check out Facebook's awesome monetization in action - > http://www.whatbosh.com/?p=11

    Its like adsense, except the ads are less relevant and usually bordering on Fraudulent. Woohoo!
  • Ned Flanders · 8 months ago
    Facebook has never been rightly valued anywhere near $15B. After Microsoft paid for some ads and also took a bit of stock everybody went off claiming that somehow equaled a $15B valuation.

    On their best day, Facebook has had about a $5B valuation, which is still pretty decent. Despite them almost (but not actually) breaking even once, I don't see the long-term potential here. Online advertising dollars and success rates are slowing down everywhere. Building an ad-funded site is the web 2.0 bubble of building a .com site and thinking somehow the valuations will just come. We're approaching the end of the ad-funded-site-as-a-business-model phase.

    I expect to see Facebook try to become a cloud computing vendor next, after they overbuild and are left with too much capacity.
  • wecandobiz · 8 months ago
    Facebook's journey to making money from the support of 200 million people is proving tortuous. We all know how fickle the crowd can be; it's what got them so many MySpace defectors. Make a wrong move and the whole lot could end on another site very quickly. It's not a situation that lends itself well to charging for features when most other sites are free.

    Twitter is looking at charging, but there are business who are integrating marketing and customer services apps into it and placing a value on their Twitter account. Might corporations do the same for their Facebook pages?

    Ian Hendry
    CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
    http://www.wecando.biz
  • Haggie · 8 months ago
    If you believe the financial numbers that a private company trying to justify a $15B valuation gives a reporter, I have this buddy in NYC named Madoff that you need to meet...
  • Eric Eldon · 8 months ago
    Sorry if there was any confusion, but I didn't get most of these numbers from Facebook:

    "But Facebook made a little less than $300 million in 2008, came within five to ten percent of breaking even, and closed the year with more than $300 million in the bank, according to reliable sources." -- not from Facebook.

    "Based on a budget the company set at the end of last year, it is on track to make a little less than $400 million, I hear...." -- not from Facebook.
  • Haggie · 8 months ago
    And "reliable sources" once said that nobody would ever lose a dollar on credit default swaps.

    If your source has financial and budget data, he/she probably also has Facebook options, so this data is highly dubious.

    I would be skeptical of these numbers if I was reading the full certified audit of Facebook by a major accounting firm.
  • Eric Eldon · 8 months ago
    So you don't want me writing about Facebook's finances because everything related to them is automatically inaccurate, no matter what evidence might be presented?
  • Haggie · 8 months ago
    You are free to write about their finances and I am free to question the "reliability" of the sources and the viability of Facebook as a whole.

    I do sincerely appreciate that you have allowed my comments. Thanks!
  • benin · 8 months ago
    Actually, I would say that with the slow down in ad growth overall, much of what is online has become more relevant to advertisers-if it offers the type of metrics and accountability that they are now demanding. That being said I don't believe that their rapid growth in users is as much of a hindrance as it is an opportunity for them.

    The proliferation of ad networks in the advertising arena + the economy putting downward pressure on ad pricing seems to have swung the pendulum back to the side other side where scale or the fat tail is once again trumping the long tail and to me where the gold may lie in Facebook is in the data and metrics beneath the ad clicks and usage that they have at their disposal on their users. I could be wrong on this one, but is there any one single entity outside of Yahoo that could boast the same-in terms of having proprietary access to this much detailed information on such a large number of people?