

Ask HN: Thoughts on Facebook - stevenj

There's been a lot of news lately regarding Facebook. I'm curious to hear what people think about Facebook the company -- its current and future potential as a company, etc. (i.e. possible enduring business models).
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swombat
Facebook is going to make shitloads of money, but is going to have a valuation
that manages to surpass that, so that both the people hyping it too much and
those hyping it too little will be proved wrong.

We know very little about how much money Facebook actually makes at the moment
- much like Twitter. My guess is that both companies are already very
profitable but playing their cards very close to the chest. They have nothing
to gain from letting out how much money they're making (the hype is already
stratospheric on both), and they have a lot to lose (copycats, spammers, etc).
All those who know the real numbers are under NDAs so strict that if they so
much as farted an information leak they'd spend the next 5 years in court.

You can fool some people some time, but you can't fool a whole battalion of
dot-com-bust-battle-hardened top notch VCs and angel investors out of hundreds
of millions of dollars for 5 years in a row. The private investors know what
they're investing in, and it's probably not hot air.

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stevenj
>Facebook is going to make shitloads of money...

How? (I tend to agree with you, but when I ask myself "How?", I don't have
clear answers.)

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kylelibra
I read they are going to have 1 trillion ad views this year.

