November 4, 2008
Well, Maybe.

Facebook - Needing Some Geld.
So apparently Facebook is spending money faster than that time we ended up at House of Rasputin, and discovered our credit card had no limit. The problem here though is that that just like us, Facebook is not making enough money to cover the costs of that little adventure, and although the site is massively popular, it’s not earning the shitloads of cash people thought it would be making. Investors are getting nervous, and they are now struggling to get additional funding.
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eMarketer estimates $265 million in revenue for Facebook in 2008. That’s great, right? Well, not really. The company is still losing money – lots of it – at current revenues. And it’s not clear that revenue will grow as robustly as costs. Most of Facebook’s growth is outside of the U.S. A year ago, according to Comscore, Facebook had 31 million U.S. visitors, about 42% of the total. Today, U.S. visitors have grown to just 41 million. 19 million live in Africa and the Middle East. 26 million are in Asia. Europe, with 48 million Facebook users, has a larger share than the U.S. Another 16 million are in Latin America. Just one in four Facebook users come from the U.S. today. As we wrote last summer, most of these international users can’t be monetized today. And to make things worse, bandwidth costs in those countries is generally much higher than the U.S. So the users cost more, and they don’t bring in any revenue. That international growth might be ok if U.S. growth remained strong. But the U.S. market just seems to be tapped at this point, and gaining market share from MySpace is a battle. As we wrote in August, at current growth rates it will take Facebook 18 years to overtake MySpace in the U.S. [via Techcrunch] |
So is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? Maybe next time you’re online, you should click on a few of those shitty adverts they have running down the side.


the FUTURE is TWITTER mate. More real time. faster. instant. just you and your FOLLOWERS. Specialize–and you are good.