Facebook is continuing its onward and upward march to dominate the Web and potentially take over the world. It has reached the 300 million active monthly users milestone, just two months after hitting 250 million and five months after hitting 200 million. More importantly, Facebook is now “cash flow positive” according to founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

There were some people who thought social networking was a fad bound to flounder before too long in the same way every other Internet fad has floundered down the years. But I see no sign of that happening, with social media sites getting more popular by the day. Twitter may be making most of the headlines but it’s Facebook that continues to dominate the space.

Facebook started the year with around 150 million active users. In April, this had increased to 200 million, and in July it had increased again to 250 million. In the two months since then Facebook has added another 50 million active users, and now has 300 million of them. This also means it has doubled its number of users in the last nine months.

Compare this to Twitter, which is aiming to have around 18 million users by the end of 2009, barely a drop in the ocean that is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg announced the milestone in a blog post where he also announced the company had hit its target of being “cash flow positive” early. While this doesn’t mean the company is turning a profit, revenue is now at a level where Facebook can comfortably maintain itself and expand.

This increase in revenue is partly down to the amount of people using the site on a very regular basis, with Facebook’s ad business now reaching a huge audience. There is now speculation that the company would be launching on the stock market as a result of its new financial position, but nothing has been confirmed in that area as of yet.

I’ve been critical of Facebook in the past, mainly due to its recent changes clearly aimed at copying aspects of Twitter in a push to harm it. But I use the service every day and think it’s now more user-friendly and feature-packed than ever before. So it must be doing something right. If only it would ban FarmVille and Mafia Wars then I’d be a happy man.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 9:44 pm under Internet, Opinion, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
Stumble It!