Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users and is Cash Flow Positive

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/facebook-crosses-300-million-users-oh-yeah-and-their-cash-flow-just-went-positive/

by aston • 17 years ago

86 78 17 years ago

unalone22• 17 years ago

Congrats to Facebook (and to the Facebook employees on HN)! This is exciting news and somewhat unexpected.

drusenko2• 17 years ago

it'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.

unalone22• 17 years ago

I 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.

fjabre• 17 years ago

I 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• 17 years ago

I believe it's the number of users who have logged in in the last month.

bdr• 17 years ago

Facebook stopped measuring inactive users a long time ago. Anything you hear out of them refers to active users.

secret• 17 years ago

So approx. the equivalent of the entire US population is active on Facebook?

tokenadult5• 17 years ago

Anything 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?

drusenko2• 17 years ago

the 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.

tokenadult5• 17 years ago

facebook goes out of their way to understate their numbers

As above, I find this to be an interesting statement, and I wonder how it could be verified. Is there a way for anyone outside of Facebook to identify unique users who post content in the most recent month? What means exist to check how many former Facebook users give up using Facebook?

daniel-cussen2• 17 years ago

Cash flow + means now web 2.0 ambitions are defensible.

unalone22• 17 years ago

Nah, 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-cussen2• 17 years ago

What I meant is that being cashflow positive means the new generation of web companies has a successful example to look to.

sfphotoarts• 17 years ago

amazing, 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.

unalone22• 17 years ago

Facebook 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• 17 years ago

There'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.

unalone22• 17 years ago

I 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.

axod• 17 years ago

Posting links, photos, videos, are all painful with twitter. Not to mention the ridiculous 140 char limit.

Doing so requires other startups! twitpic twitvid bit.ly etc etc

Startups, to add features to twitter that should already be there :/ madness I tell you.

chris11• 17 years ago

It's not that great for deep personal conversations. But it is good for easily finding out whats going on in your friends and acquaintances lives. It keeps me connected to people I don't see a lot. It has usually been how I have found out about old classmates engagements and other major events.

unalone22• 17 years ago

I keep only 22 friends, and treat Facebook like an almost-private journal. Deep personal conversations work if you use Facebook like that. It's up to the user.

cglee• 17 years ago

It's basically the only way I maintain online relationship with most of my non-technical friends. Most of them just use email and FB. If your only circle is tech savvy folks, then FB's value is probably not very high.

j_b_f4• 17 years ago

There's something sort of sad about this statement. Actually, now that I think about it, it was less sad when the site was feed-based. Important stuff bubbled to the top and I felt connected. Now that it's stream-based, it's just a flood of minutiae and the important stuff gets lost in the noise. My FB-connected relationships feel less weighty as a result. Weird!

c00p3r• 17 years ago

Which means you're either refuse to use the way of communication your friends like or did not have many friends.

Facebook is not for communicate with a people in next block. It for links between countries and cultures (excuse me for this pathos =).

mixmax2• 17 years ago

I wonder when HN will be cashflow positive :-)

icey• 17 years ago

Do you mean HN or YC?

mixmax2• 17 years ago

It was a joke, since the goal of HN is not to make money. It wasn't very well received though...

zepolen• 17 years ago

Is their revenue entirely ad based?

unalone22• 17 years ago

They also let users send virtual gifts to one another for really low prices.

blasdel3• 17 years ago

'gifts' being 64x64px icons that have been curated by Facebook staff.

georgekv• 17 years ago

Some stats to consider:

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

ironkeith2• 17 years 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

vijayr• 17 years ago

The same can be said about dumb TV programs, flash games and even video games.

Never underestimate the "value" of "entertainment", especially on the internet.

mediaman• 17 years ago

It's not clear that it was replacing productive time.

tokenadult5• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

Does 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...".

tokenadult5• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

So, 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.

Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users and is Cash Flow Positive

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