Facebook given $15 billion valuation, Zuckerberg not worried
By Justin Montgomery
Facebook is doing well, really well actually. After the $15 billion valuation Microsoft gave it last year, the company is chugging along nicely with “hundreds of millions” of dollars coming in annually in ad-based revenue alone.
PC World is reporting that Facebook’s ad business is humming along nicely, generating a healthy cash stream both from direct sales to big brand marketers and from smaller advertisers that buy space on the site using its self-service tools, Zuckerberg said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. On top of that, the company has grown to include a worldwide user-base of nearly 125 million, making revenue generation a low priority at this point.
That’s an excellent position to be in, especially in an economy as battered as ours is currently. Speaking in San Francisco, Zuckerberg dispelled myths that the company would soon be in a cash crunch and be in need of another round of funding. And by the looks of his current financial situation, it looks to be true. With the rocky road the company traveled in creating its ad-based revenue model, many industry analysts speculated that the company would find itself in a less than desirable position, but it looks to be the opposite.
Another area where Facebook is working diligently to better themselves is by opening the company and its platforms up to developers and others. Questioned about whether Facebook is purposefully not participating in Google-sponsored efforts like the OpenSocial set of APIs (application programming interfaces) for building social-networking applications, Zuckerberg said there isn’t an intentionally adversarial attitude toward the search giant.
One thing’s for sure, Facebook is obviously on the right track. If the company can put themselves in such a good position during such trying times, they have nothing to worry about. If anything, the only areas of improvement they need to work on is the aforementioned area of “openness.” Other than that, keep up the good work!
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