

What Could You Do With 200 Million Users? - zheller
http://zachheller.com/2009/04/08/what-could-you-do-with-200-million-users/

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patio11
200 million users is approximately, hmm, 1 million times more users than one
needs to be ramen profitable, and one hundred thousand times more users than
one needs to be quite wealthy, and ten thousand times more users than one
needs to be filthy stinking rich, and yet _still not enough for Facebook to be
profitable_.

Charge money.

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josefresco
The day FB charges money for a premium account is the day all the competing
networks start promoting their service as "100% free".

I think Zuck, and FB in general are stuck in the mindset that they want to
'change the world' with their application. Being profitable is simply
uninteresting to them, just like picking up a nickel off the sidewalk is not
worth the trouble for you and I (we have better things to do).

FB's stated goal is to have between 1-2 billion users, with lofty goals like
that, making a little money now is a low priority.

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jasongullickson
If they plan on doing it (charging for some kind of account) I think they need
to start soon. Facebook is already decaying into the sort of novelty/advert
app, Hallmark gift shop mess that Myspace has been for years. A year from now
their product will be alot harder to sell to the kind of people who would be
willing to pay for it.

...Unless you could buy an account where you never had to see an ad or a
third-party app of any kind, I might even pay for that.

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jonknee
Accountants: We're losing more money with every new user

Zuck: We'll make it up with volume!

Investors: OK

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josefresco
Funny joke, but didn't FB say they would be profitable in 2010?

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jonknee
The outgoing CFO said they would be cash flow positive in 2010, but who knows
how advertising projections will hold up? It's kind of a down market at the
moment.

He could have simply meant they plan to stop buying $100m of servers every
year next year and as a consequence won't run a net loss. Or it could just be
the fired CFO talking nonsense. Who knows really?

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donw
I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two chicks at the same time, man. I always
wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had 200 million users, I could hook
that up, too; 'cause chicks dig geeks with a large userbase.

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pclark
monetize them

~~~
marketer
It's no mystery how facebook is going to monetize their users -- by
advertising. It's what they've been doing since a few months after their
launch.

There was an interview with marc andreessen a couple months ago, and he
plainly said that facebook could become a billion dollar company if it turned
on aggressive advertising. But it's trying to figure out the most effective
way to advertise without alienating users.

~~~
vaksel
don't be so sure, all the people I know who tried their hand at advertising on
facebook all say that the site converts like crap.

~~~
jasongullickson
Agreed. It's also hard to get good metrics if you want to use something other
than Facebook's tools. Hard to beat Google at this game when they do both the
advertising and the analytics better than anyone else.

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jasongullickson
What do you do that has users, and what would you do with 200M of them?

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josefresco
Change the world.

/for the better I would hope

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Eliezer
Take over a country.

