One of the biggest and the most cherished social networking websites of all time, Facebook is expected to post over revenues in the amount of billions of dollars over the next five years, due to its ever increasing popularity and the role it has been playing in keeping the world connected, especially in the times of crisis. e.g. the post election violence in Iran. This estimate has been given by Mark Andreessen, who is a Silicon Valley based entrepreneur and is also a member of the Facebook board of directors.
As of now, Facebook has declared its revenue to be $500 million for this half of the year 2009 and is expected to post $1 billion for this entire year if it continues to concentrate on selling advertising.
However, according to Mark Andreessen, it would be more beneficial for social networking websites, such as Twitter and Facebook to concentrate on gathering and expanding their user base , than putting their resources to earn big bucks. In a statement, he said,
“This calendar year they’ll do over $500 million. If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year.”
Facebook, that has venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, Microsoft Corp and Russian Internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies as it investors, has never openly talked about its revenues, but has said that, it expects to see a growth in the revenue by almost 70% this year.
Apart from being a board of directors member on Facebook, Andreessen is also an investor in another social networking website, Twitter. Inspite of the fact that, as of now Twitter doesn’t earn nay revenue, still its investors aren’t worried about the micro blogging website, as they understand that, Twitter needs to get its user base first, before reaching out to revenues.
Another investor in Twitter, Ben Horowitz, executive from Netscape said,
“They have to take the market. There is no investor in Twitter who will tell you: ‘Boy, those guys are screwing up, there’s no revenue yet.’”
Via Reuters.
