I’m done digging on this story and I’m just going to come out and say it. Facebook revenue estimates have been all over the place for 2010 – from less than a billion ranging up to nearly $2 billion. eMarketer recently estimated $1.28 billion, for example.
I haven’t poked around on the Facebook CFO’s laptop for a while now (those were the days!), so I don’t have anything better to report. Except this – fairly senior Facebook employees are telling their friends that the company will hit and just exceed $2 billion in revenue this year. Part of this is just talking to friends. And part of it is recruiting.
Right or wrong, it’s a consistent message over the last several weeks that has come from half a dozen or more second hand sources. And it’s always the same message – “my friend at Facebook just told me they were going to have more than $2 billion in 2010 revenue.”
As a point of comparison, Google first crossed the $1 billion in revenue threshold in 2004, the year they went public. By 2006 they had $10 billion in revenue, and they crossed $20 billion in 2008.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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