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Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users and is Cash Flow Positive
- unalone 17y agoCongrats to Facebook (and to the Facebook employees on HN)! This is exciting news and somewhat unexpected.
- drusenko 17y agoit's only unexpected if you've been solely listening to the "facebook sucks" and "facebook is a bubble" bandwagon that seems to be particularly prominent here on HN. there's been tons of news about their high revenue numbers lately and they've been approaching cash-flow positive for a long time now.
- unalone 17y agoI was actually in the middle today of writing an essay about why Facebook isn't a fad, to counter that attitude a bit. I knew they had improved their revenue significantly, but I was under the impression that they had a ways to go.
- seiji 17y agoWhat is a fad? Is their staying power in line with IBM or AOL or are they something completely new an unexpected? 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.
- unalone 17y agoI'm almost done with writing this thing! I explain better what I mean there, so hopefully you'll forgive me for waiting another hour or two and posting that.
- fjabre 17y agoI would love to understand what the 300 million number actually means. Does that mean they've signed up 300 million users but only half are active or some other percentage or do they actually have 300 million active users..? Active = logs in once a week?
- jkincaid 17y agoI believe it's the number of users who have logged in in the last month.
- bdr 17y agoFacebook stopped measuring inactive users a long time ago. Anything you hear out of them refers to active users.
- secret 17y agoSo approx. the equivalent of the entire US population is active on Facebook?
- unalone 17y agoYes.
- tokenadult 17y agoAnything you hear out of them refers to active users. 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?
- drusenko 17y agothe majority of websites quote user numbers as the total number of users who have signed up (ourselves and myspace included, if i remember correctly) -- it's pretty standard. facebook goes out of their way to understate their numbers (compared to everyone else) and only talk about the total number of active users.
- daniel-cussen 17y agoCash flow + means now web 2.0 ambitions are defensible.
- unalone 17y agoNah, web 2.0 was about the power of the social mind and collectivism. Facebook was actually one of the first sites to reject that mindset and focus on walling off their users. When I wrote for AllFacebook in 2006 I think I actually wrote something arguing they were closer to Tim O'Reilly's idea of web 3.0 or the semantic web, wherein all information is easily related to other information.
- daniel-cussen 17y agoWhat I meant is that being cashflow positive means the new generation of web companies has a successful example to look to.
- sfphotoarts 17y agoamazing, 300 million people can see something I can't. Am I the only person working in the tech field not to have facebook? Congratulations indeed, what an amazing scaling success story. Every statistic I read about them is staggering.
- unalone 17y agoFacebook is most likely least popular in the tech industry, where people are more into "cutting-edge" sites or rely on older tools like email. That's why there's such an oft-lopsided view of them on HN.
- makeee 17y agoThere's nothing all that special about it. If all your friends/acquaintances are on it then it's great, otherwise it's not that useful. If all my friends were on twitter then I'd probably be using that instead.
- unalone 17y agoI know that in this thread I'm playing the part of the outspoken Facebook fanboy, but: They entered a market competing against a site that was at a time the fourth-most used site on the planet, and in three years usurped its position, introduced an entirely new paradigm to how web sites worked, swiftly and mercilessly eliminated the trend towards theme personalization, redefined their design three times, added a slew of features that were ripped off by every site around them, and did it all without compromising its theme of "We know what we're doing, fuck you" and generally being right.
- mixmax 17y agoI wonder when HN will be cashflow positive :-)
- zepolen 17y agoIs their revenue entirely ad based?
- unalone 17y agoThey also let users send virtual gifts to one another for really low prices.
- blasdel 17y ago'gifts' being 64x64px icons that have been curated by Facebook staff.
- unalone 17y agoI think they worked better when Facebook offered them free to promote things. There were a lot of Dark Knight icons being passed around when the movie came out. I don't know any friend that's actually bought one.
- whatusername 17y agoActually - someone pointed out to me recently that a 64x64px flower lasts a whole lot longer than a chocolate bar.
- blasdel 17y ago
- georgekv 17y agoSome stats to consider: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
- ironkeith 17y ago"More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day" 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
- tokenadult 17y ago"More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)" 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?
- brk 17y agoDoes anyone have any actual stats/data on this, beyond Facebook's own vague statement and the Techcrunch hype? 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...".
- tokenadult 17y agoCash 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. 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.
- pizza 17y agoSo, now facebook would theoretically be the 4th most populous country. Damn. Countries like China and India have been around for thousands of years. And then, 3rd up, America: under 300 years. And facebook: 4 years.