What would you be willing to pay FaceBook a couple of bucks for? Vanity address? Custom Layout capabilities? According to Sheryl Sandberg, they’re looking at options — and a dollar from 200-million users is pretty sweet change …
Does Facebook’s Business Plan Include Premium Memberships?
Douglas MacMillan posted a good article on Business Week yesterday, here’s a very slight excerpt:
The world’s largest social network sometimes gets flack from bloggers and industry pundits for not having much of a business model. It’s true that for now, Facebook is more focused on growing its number of users — which passed 200 million this week — than its bottom line. But the company is generating revenue from advertising
FaceBook is probably the most talked about web entity in a long time. Just about everyone has some connection to FaceBook either directly or indirectly. BusinessWeek editor-in-chief Stephen Adler chats with FaceBook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg on Apr. 7:
There is a lot of like, “What is the business? What is your business model?” And it’s a really simple answer, which is that our business is advertising. We’re not waiting to find our business, but we found it and it’s actually working very well.
As Adler pointed out in the interview, most estimates peg Facebook’s revenue at something between $1 and $2 per user annually — assuming $300 million (an unconfirmed figure) from 200 million people — which is quite small for a site with that many regular users, even for a free Web service. Rival social network MySpace, for example, is estimated to take in between $6 and $7 in ad revenues per user.
(You can catch up with Fred on Facebook, along with a number of other Mac user group notables like David Pogue, Maria Arguello, and others http://www.facebook.com/people/Fred-Showker/ )
