Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
Facebook – “Hey, We made money!”
For easily the last three years, everyone’s been saying ‘Yeah, its great, but good luck making any money,’ thus leading to the ultimate demise of the Social Network while something new comes along and investors move their money along (e.g., Friendster, MySpace, etc, etc). But today, Facebook has proven them all wrong by announcing not only that they’ve reached a staggering 300 million plus users (take note: the US Census puts the US population at around 307 million), but that they’ve posted their first profitable quarter since inception, meaning they will haul in 500 million some odd dollars before year’s end. Pretty phenomenal for a 5 year old company, started in a Harvard dorm room by a couple buddies.
So, there’s a bit of sweet justice here. Everyone who’s been denying the power of social media as a legitimate tool for marketing based on the concept that their model is unsustainable and will not turn a profit, has been proven wrong. I’m not going to say I didn’t have my doubts either, but there seems to be a much stronger crew behind the scenes here, and considering everyone and their mom (literally) has a Facebook profile now, it seemed like the only thing keeping them from their goal was attention span. Would the people get bored and move on? Well, apparently not. Facebook has remained the dominant social network for easily 3 years now and will most like continue into the following year. We’ll see if history repeats itself and something comes along to replace, but for now, I think we’re Facebookin’ it for at least a while longer.
More over at Wired: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/facebook-makes-money-tops-300-million-users/
