

Facebook Is Hunting for More Money - tokenadult
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2009/tc20090326_604141.htm

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zepolen
Are my numbers wrong or shouldn't $200 million / year revenue support them and
even turn a profit:

Generous estimate: 100 billion pageviews a month @ ~400kb = ~40,000 terrabytes
of data or just under ~150Gbps of bandwidth.

What does a Gbps cost? $10,000 a month? Probably less considering their scale,
but let's say it costs that much.

So for bandwidth: $20 million a year.

How many servers? I recall a presentation saying they used 800 or so servers,
but to be sure say it's become 5,000 and say servers cost $4000 and must be
replaced each year:

So for servers: $20 million a year.

As for storage, 10 billion photos @ 400kb (way too generous here) = 4000
terrabytes a month - What's a 1TB hard disk cost, $200? Triple redundancy just
in case:

So for storage: $30 million a year

How many people does it employ? 1000?

So for people: $100 million a year.

    
    
      people:    $100 mil
      storage:   $30 mil
      servers:   $20 mil
      bandwidth: $20 mil
      ------------------
      total:     $170 mil
    
    

What am I not seeing?

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tokenadult
"Facebook board member Peter Thiel told BusinessWeek the company did not need
to raise any more money and had sufficient cash to continue at its current
growth rate."

The last journalistic quotation I saw from Peter Thiel was this gem: "Thiel
won't say precisely where he values the company other than to say, 'It's worth
more than people think it is'" (also from a Business Week article). Where do I
get a financial officer like that?

