Facebook reveal

[bradzx]

Now that Facebook has filed its paperwork to go public, we're getting our first real glimpse at the inner workings of the world's largest social networking website.

It's pretty impressive.

Let's set aside the potential for Facebook's valuation to get out hand. We're still several weeks away from actual deal pricing and retail investor reactions. What we have now are the company's fundamentals.

Let's dive into a few of the numbers that may surprise you.

845 million: Facebook has 845 million monthly active users. Yes, that's impressive. Some skeptics who thought Facebook was celebrating milestones of cumulative registrations probably didn't realize the dot-com darling only counts current users.

483 million: There are 483 million daily active users. In other words, more than half of Facebook's users are on the website in any given day. The key point here is that while active monthly users have climbed by 39% over the past year, daily active users have increased by 48%. In other words, Facebook continues to get stickier with consumers.

100 billion: There are 100 billion -- yes, billion -- friendship connections on the website. The next time someone brings up Google+, Pinterest, or whatever the Facebook killer flavor of the week may be, realizing that undoing the connections that Facebook has already secured is far easier said than done.




$3.7 billion: That's the amount of revenue Facebook generated last year. You didn't think a "free" website could generate that kind of money? Well, Facebook is the runaway leader in display advertising, and it's starting to make a decent amount of money through the payment platform that app developers are using. A neat thing about the revenue is that it's 88% ahead of 2010's top-line sum. Remember from two paragraphs ago how the number of monthly active users grew by 39% over the past year. Relative to that, an 88% growth in revenue means Facebook is milking more money out of every user.

$1 billion: Facebook generated net income of $1 billion in 2011, and it has been profitable in each of the past three years. Divide $1 billion into $3.7 billion and you get net margins of 27%. That's deeply impressive for a company that was born in a Harvard dorm room not too long ago.

12%: No company has embraced social gaming and its potential on Facebook the way Zynga (ZNGA) has. A beefy 12% of Facebook's revenue comes from Zynga cutting it in on a piece of its gaming revenue action.

$3.9 billion: Facebook had $3.9 billion in cash at the end of 2011. Its working capital clocked in at $3.7 billion. Obviously, Facebook isn't going public because it needs to raise money. It just needs to give its early investors a way out.

Cynics have been comparing Facebook's IPO to last year's overpriced Groupon (GRPN) debut, but Groupon wasn't profitable and probably did need the money.

Facebook's coming. It's not going to be cheap.

.....That is huge money and people. I don't know how to say about this. I mean..that...is really huge...

 

[AlanJohn]

You haven't seen Google's revenue yet...

 

[bradzx]

I know that. But I just shock about that.

 

[frogboy]

And the owner is a multi-zillionare.

 

[Depravo]

I wonder how many millions of dollars revenue other companies have lost because of staff using Facebook on the job.

 

[wasim]

I wonder how many millions of dollars revenue other companies have lost because of staff using Facebook on the job.

Really ?
I mean does this really happen ?

 

[Blood Fetish]

Take away duplicate accounts used for games like Mafia Wars and Farmville and I suspect the real user count drops by 100 million or more.

 

[Vulpes Abnocto]

I wonder how many millions of dollars revenue other companies have lost because of staff using Facebook on the job.

Really ?
I mean does this really happen ?

Absolutely. I know WAY too many older women posting their Bejeweled Blitz scores when they're supposed to be "productive".

 

[Gahars]

An accurate representation of how Facebook's employees took the news.

 

[Rydian]

People understimate advertising revenue.

 

[Foxi4]

People understimate advertising revenue.

Facebook is the one website that "sells" the item many people in today's world crave for and don't have the means to achieve - the concept of "having friends".

In the world of cubicles, depression is rampant - people live their daily lives getting up, going to work and going to bed, social life is decomposing like a rotting corpse of its former glory. People like to live in the bubble of "having many friends", even if they don't know them, never talked to them and never seen'em. It simply allows them to stay sane, in a sense it satisfies the need for social interaction and acceptation - people do it automatically and subconciously, hence the massive popularity. This is why people are glued to it and this is why it makes so much revenue. There are people who treat their friend meter as a matter of life and death.

...and people who do NOT have those issues yet simply use it as a great way to communicate as the site embeds itself everywhere in the forms of "Log in with Facebook account"'s and other "Post on your Wall"'s and "Like"'s.