How much money do you think Facebook will make this year? According to Mark Andreessen, famed Internet entrepreneur and board member of Facebook, Facebook should make around $500 million this year, but if they really pushed on getting new advertising deals they could top $1 billion this year.
Andreessen added that at this stage of Facebook’s life cycle it’s far more important that they increase their userbase and keep the users they already have, rather than push to monetise the website. Facebook already has 225 million registered users, so currently makes a very small amount of profit per user, but as their userbase increases they could earn billions of dollars per year in a few years time.
Andreessen said an interview with Reuters:
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.
There’s every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now
Andreessen has a solid pedigree when it comes to Internet properties, having founded Netscape and invested in Twitter. However Andreessen did let slip that he missed the boat with Facebook, as he didn’t invest when he had the opportunity.
His investment in Twitter is a slow burner too, as the company makes no money at present, but Andreessen is more than happy with the progress made by the micro blogging website.
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.’
He referenced the mistakes made by MySpace in selling advertisements after it was bought by News Corp, instead of concentrating on improving the user experience. As such MySpace has now lost ground on Facebook. Facebook won’t make the same mistakes.
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