Facebook turned 5 years old a couple of days ago and the hottest topic that everyone’s been discussing is how are they going to make money.
With funding of over 500 million USD which includes Internet giant Microsoft and nearly 70 billion page views per month, Facebook does have the numbers to keep more and more people interested to put their money in it, but where are the numbers when it comes to the revenues?
The last we heard from Facebook regarding the money they’re making ( which is generally very secretive), was when Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that their 2007 revenues was 150 Million USD and that they were expecting 350 Million USD by the end of 2008 as their projected revenue.
The question everyone is asking is what will Facebook’s core source of revenue be?
Fred Wilson over at A VC has a brilliant summary of various business models that an online venture can employ.
Now that you’ve checked that out. What’s it going to be for Facebook? True, Google, the biggest success story of our times took nearly 3-4 years before they discovered Adwords and they too had developed a huge community of loyal Googlers before they started making some real money. But now after half a decade, people all over are starting to wonder where does Facebook go from here?
It has to take care of their thriving developer community too who as of now aren’t really being paid by Facebook yet are growing everyday. They need to be sure that Facebook is going to be around for a long time with a real business model. What I mean to say is that the really popular application makers do make money from third party networks, but what about the lesser popular app developers. They need an incentive too right?
True, Facebook has the advantage, being one of the most popular website on the internet, but it has to find a way to capitalize on it.
why should facebook worry about its developers cos they helped them by atleast providing them a way to garner succes through fb apps if those developers could give their time in building projects for opensource-firefox etc plugins for free then they can really be happy about fb cos atleast it gives a way to monetize them …….
If you’re helping someone make money then you should be paid for it. The developers are an integral part of the FB ecosystem and should be taken care of. Not every developer is earning through their apps, only the really really popular ones are.
As far as Mozilla plugins are concerned well till recently, Mozilla was a non profit organisation (that is before Mozilla corp came in and said they wanna make money too). FB isn’t non profit! The developers are enabling Zuckerberg to make millions.
If blogger can create a revenue programme for its bloggers, why an’t facebook. It’s only fair.