Facebook prospectus shows jump in users, fall in profits

Facebook's latest pre-IPO filing shows the social network giant ramped up to 901 million users, who produce 3.2 billion likes and comments a day. Oh, and it said its net income slipped on the year as operating expenses ballooned. The updated S1 filing covered the period up to March 31, and bombarded potential investors with …

[Bjorg]

Better than I thought

"431 active users last year to 901 million this year"

I thought Facebook was reaching a growth ceiling, but a 20,000% increase seems to indicate otherwise :).

[miknik]

$200 million profit?

So with one of the more recent conservative valuations of $50 billion the ROI will be 250 years.

Almost looks like Zuck paid for Instagram about what anyone with any sense would pay for FB.

[Jonathan Richards 1]

The other weak what?

Sealed the other weak. Really.

[Cliff]

Nobody learned a thing

In what we will in the future call the first dotcom boom and bust, lots of successful companies lost a lot of money by believing that having lots of users was a good thing. This was because you multiplied an arbitrary constant by the number of users, and it gave you a 'value'. Reality is it gives you a cost. The more successful YouTube it, the more it costs Google to run it, for instance. Anyway, lots of companies changed hands at stupid money because it was a (pretty flipping blatant) bubble. It turned out a registered user was not worth the $1000 'value' fantasists said they were.

Anyone remember Marconi? They put cash in the dotcom boom, now they are owned by the French company Thales. BT made £100/sec profit at one point, they spunked a load of it on dotcom nonsense. Murdoch's balls were $650M or something lighter for this thing very few people will remember as relevant 'MySpace' (GeoCities++). Friendsreunited seemed like a good buy for a once rich ITV.

Clearly we are much smarter now, and would never overvalue a company which could be irrelevant within a year if the tides turn (as fads/fashions do)! Me, I'm going back to pork bellies futures and tulip bulbs - at least you know your cash is as safe as houses.

[Antidisestablishmentarianist]

Sounds a winner!

Where do I sign up?

[Tony Paulazzo]

I put an ad for Google+ on my Facebook status update