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As a private company the financials are private of course, but take this as you will: "Dropbox’s ascent has been just as stunning. The 50-million-user figure i

As a private company the financials are private of course, but take this as you will: "Dropbox’s ascent has been just as stunning. The 50-million-user figure is up threefold from a year ago, and it has solved the “freemium” riddle, with revenue on track to hit $240 million in 2011 despite the fact that 96% of those users pay nothing. With only 70 staffers, mostly engineers, Dropbox grosses nearly three times more per employee than even the darling of business models, Google. Houston claims it’s already profitable but won’t reveal margins." http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbo... That's from 2 years ago, with 50M users. They now have 175M users. Extrapolate as you will.

hackinthebochs 13y ago
But has the percentage of premium users stayed constant as they grew? I wonder what percentage of users must be premium for dropbox to be/stay profitable. Or perhaps what percentage of traffic must be "premium traffic". Either way, there are a lot of unknowns, but I don't think this market is sustainable. Like Jobs said, dropbox is a feature, not a product. They are able to exploit a market inefficiency for the time being. I don't see that lasting for much longer. Dropbox's long term future rests on them evolving into something that isn't easy to duplicate or pre-bundle. And even then, unless dropbox pivots massively, the market just won't be as big. File sharing simply is not a multi-billion dollar market. (I can't help but wonder who I'm talking to seeing as you whipped out a throwaway for a dropbox discussion thread)