Posts Tagged ‘revenue’

FB profitable on $2B in revenue? Not buying it…

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Will FB get $2B in rev in 2010?  That would be something like 4-5x growth over the past year.  Unless it is mostly Zynga and by extension the text spam companies paying it (and by extension you Farmville players), I am not seeing it.  But the WSJ says its possible (from TechCrunch).

Jason Kincaid

…While the article covers a lot of familiar territory about Facebook’s past, there’s plenty of new information too. Of note, the article says that Facebook executives have “discussed how revenues for 2010 could hit between $1.2 to $2 billion” — figures that exceed even the $1.1 billion InsideFacebook’s Eric Eldon reported yesterday (clearly, the number is looking big). The article also asserts that Facebook is working on a tool for sharing your physical location with Facebook (something that we’ve been hearing about for quite a while, and that I believe will be key in the future).

Oh and Kincaid reports on this other nugget:

There are also a handful of interesting anecdotes about Zuckerberg. According to the article, a Facebook engineer once wrote an internal memo called “Working With Zuck”, in which he warned other employees not to hope for much in the way of back-patting from their CEO, explaining they should not “expect acknowledgment for your role in moving the discussion forward; getting the product right should be its own reward.”

Well, that’s great. Would love to work for that guy.
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Good for CoTweet – bought by ExactTarget

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Well how about that.  Good for CoTweet.

Adam Ostrow

CoTweet, the Twitter CRM tool used by several massive brands including Best Buy and Ford, has been acquired by ExactTarget, an email marketing firm.

In a statement, ExactTarget CEO Scott Dorsey said,” By combining the power of ExactTarget and CoTweet, we can provide businesses a complete solution to tie together all formsof interactive communications and drive deeper customer engagement online.”

While perhaps not a widely known name in the social media space, ExactTarget is a major player in email marketing, generating $114 million in revenue for 2009. The company has also raised a massive $140 in venture capital, most recently securing $75 million this past December.

I think this combo actually makes perfect sense.  I could also have seen a DemandMedia or Adobe or Yahoo scooping them up.  I wonder what other companies are like CoTweet running around…

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Finally a Facebook revenue scheme I get

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Facebook money… facebook’s way of making money.  Annoyed by Facebook applications?  Hoping FB does something to curb their ubiquity on your stream?  Well, don’t look now but Facebook’s incentives just got twisted.  By taking a cut of the applications through Facebook Credits, FB will have every reason to make sure high performing apps make it in front of the most people.  And this revenue stream I understand.  So is Facebook ultimately a massively multiplayer online game system?  I’d say yep.

Samuel Axon

 

Facebook will soon roll Facebook Credits out to even more application developers, so it has publicly announced that it will take 30% of the revenues earned for goods sold via Facebook Credits.

Facebook Credits make up Facebook’s virtual currency; the currency became available to some users last Spring. Those users could buy gifts with it. Facebook then made a deal that gave users the ability to purchase Facebook Credits with their PayPal accounts and offered Facebook Credits as a currency option to several application developers, including uber-huge game-makers Playfish and Zynga.

Facebook says it’s taking the 30% cut so it can invest “heavily in the ecosystem” by educating users and marketing to them about the currency, testing out incentives to get people to try the credits out, and seeding credits to get people comfortable with them.

Now if I could only find my way around facebook again…

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