Recap of Facebook Financial Info

Facebook’s Revenue: $150m

Facebook’s Projected Revenue: $300 to $350m

Facebook’s Projected Expenditures: $200m

Facebook’s EBITDA: $50m

All together this means: $150m negative projected for this year.

Of course, this doesn’t count the $300m in investments from Microsoft, so they’ll still be in business… but I sure hope they figure out how to make the money soon, and in a way that doesn’t piss off the users.

Source: Chatty Zuckerberg Tells All About Facebook Finances

Sidenote: MySpace

MySpace’s revenue (ending June 2007): $550m

MySpace’s profit (ending June 2007): $10m

Source: (MySpace revenue to top $800 million in fiscal 2008)

MySpace’s Projected Revenue (at Oct 2007):$800m

Source: (Murdoch Cuts MySpace 2008 Estimates)

User “Counts”

Regardless of how much I hate MySpace, people use it. People click on the advertisements, and so MySpace keeps making money.

The point here is that it’s good to be #1. MySpace has more than 110m monthly active users (Social Network Stats:Facebook, MySpace, Reunion), while facebook has 68m monthly active users (The shy Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook).

If all these numbers are right, then Facebook has some serious catching up to do. Here’s my fuzzy math on revenue per user:

Revenue / Monthly Active Users of MySpace = 550/110 = 5

Revenue / Monthly Active Users of Facebook = 150/68 ~= 2.2

Does this mean a Facebook times 2 equals a MySpace in revenue?

My Takeaway/Realization From All This Math

If you’re making a free “social network”, and your single monetization strategy is advertising, you better hope you’re #1. Or freaking close to it.