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We all knew that Facebook was that big but how big it really was never sunk in quite well. No one gets 800 million users without making a few bucks. Question was we didn't know just how big. In the past we wrote on the possibility of Facebook offering stocks and now you can have the chance to own a piece of it!
Facebook looks more seasoned than many of its Silicon Valley peers had when they announced plans to go public. According to the prospectus it filed with the SEC, Facebook has been profitable for the past three years. The company reported revenues of .7 billion last year, an 88 percent increase over the prior year, and earned a billion profit, more than Google's total revenue the year it debuted on public markets. Facebook's income also dwarfs that of other internet companies that recently completed their IPOs. Zynga's profits totaled .6 million in 2010, for example, while LinkedIn had barely flirted with profitability when it filed for its IPO and Pandora was still hundreds of millions of dollars short of breaking even.
Advertising comprises a full 85 percent of Facebook's revenues, down from 98 percent in 2009. Zynga alone accounts for 12 percent of Facebook's total revenues, as the social gaming company must pay Facebook a cut of purchases made in Zynga's Facebook games.
Facebook revealed impressive statistics about its growing and active userbase, which totals 845 million members, more than half of whom, or 483 million, return to the site daily. These hundreds of millions of users have shared more than 100 petabytes (100 quadrillion bytes) of photos and videos with Facebook, and produced an average of 2.7 billion "likes" and comments a day in the final three months of 2011.
The company's stunning growth will prove difficult, if not impossible, to sustain, however. Facebook has reached a 60 percent penetration in the U.S. and U.K., according to the company's own estimates, and Facebook warned investors to expect its expansion to slow. Unlike other social networking sites that were similar to “one-hit wonders”, Facebook is aiming guns at a future it might dominate for a good number of years. Who knows, it may just eclipse Google or Microsoft in its success?
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