Facebook earned more than $800 million in 2009 say reports

June 23, 2010 - PRLog -- Facebook's massive growth led to even better financial results in 2009 than most experts expected, according to a Reuters report.


The explosion in the social networking site’s number of users and advertisers boosted revenue for the year to as much as $800 million, the agency has been told unofficially.

A profit in the tens of millions of dollars was also earned last year, one of the sources said.

The figures show how Facebook is making increasing profits from its service, which after six years is the world's largest social media network, with nearly half a billion users.


Investors keen for a chance to own some of the company are likely to be cheered by the figures, despite Facebook's insistence that a public flotation of all or part of the business is not in its short-term plans.


Facebook, the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg and a group of his Harvard University friends in 2004, is privately owned, and is very secretive about its financial performance.

The 2009 results are significantly better than some of the figures that Facebook itself had suggested earlier in the year, as well as analysts' estimates that have appeared in various media reports.

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Last July, Facebook board member Marc Andreessen told Reuters the company was on track to surpass $500 million in annual revenue for 2009. And in September, Facebook said that it was generating enough cash to cover its operating expenses as well as its capital spending needs.

If Facebook eventually seeks to go public, unveiling financial figures above expectations could help bolster investor interest.



Facebook's revenue growth has come as the number of users on its website has exploded. The company started 2009 with the January announcement that it had reached 150 million users. By December, that number had swelled to 350 million.


"We can provide really good, relevant advertising to people because they tell us exactly what they are interested in, and who they know, and those people tell us what they're interested in," Facebook Chief Executive Zuckerberg said at the All Things Digital conference this month.

He cited statements by other Facebook executives that the number of advertisers on the site had increased four-fold in the past 18 months.


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"Just having all those different ads in the system makes it so there's more to draw from and people get more relevant ads," he said.


Big brands such as AT&T, Ford Motor Co and Blackberry-maker Research in Motion all advertised on Facebook during the first four months of 2010, according to Internet analytics firm comScore

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