Offered here more as a sign of the huge and growing power of one social networking platform and not so much as a business story, this Facebook thing is completely bonkers. We know that Facebook received this huge investment from Goldman Sachs on a valuation of $50 billion. Now the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have numbers about how the track Facebook is on would seem to justify that.
Check it:
2009 REVENUE: $775 million
2009 PROFIT: $200 million
2010 REVENUE: ~$2 billion
2010 PROFIT: ~$500 million
So the company could be on it’s way to $1 billion in profit in 2011. Profit! All the while, Facebook expands into geolocation, Q&A, and shopping. Now, reality check: not all of those have caught on or will catch on. And the big caveat, of course, is that AOL was once pretty powerful too. So was Yahoo. These things are fashion intensive, historically. Will Facebook break the pattern? Or in a few years will we all be making fun of it from our accounts on, just making up a name here, ScrubboHead.com or something?
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