Why Arrington is wrong about Facebook’s finances

That's a piss poor analysis, to be frank.

First, let's be honest: Facebook's problem is that it spends more on each user than it receives. In other words, its current operating P&L sheet is negative. That cannot possibly be disputed, unless there is some magical fairy dust that generates ad-revenue many magnitudes greater than the norm.

It's really irrelevant whether you believe that it costs Facebook $100M a month to operate, as Arrington seems to, or whether you figure FB can get by on a $1M a month shoestring budget. The fact remains that, regardless the numbers of users, per capita there is negative revenue generated.

Arrington argues that increasing the number of users, while not solving the per capita loss, hastens the use of those capital reserves of $500M. On this point, he is exactly correct. It's basic math. The rest is just semantics.

They need to solve the problem that revenue on a per user basis is a negative number. Not only do they need to make that number positive, they need to bring it into the black far enough that they can pay back their $500M in borrowed money, and give some sort of return. They need to do this before any of their current (or future) sources of funding collapse. This is a very tough problem to solve. (BTW, google was in this position once)

My humble opinion is that they won't be able to do this anytime soon, and will most likely fail in the future. As much as they laugh at the ad-driven screenshot in the article, that's probably what FB will look like in due time.

I'm just going with the odds. Outside of Google, I don't know of any company that's been able to come up with the last minute Hail Mary business plan.

Wow, this is just a horrible explanation of why Arrington is (supposedly) wrong.

He does not refute or offer clarification on the money burn. Instead, he cites the user growth rate, but at what cost do those users come? Should we somehow assume that every new user has an immediate positive value?

The 15bn valuation number is also an often mentioned fallacy. For their money, Microsoft got some Facebook stock and some advertising impressions. No one has ever really clarified how much of Microsofts $275m went to stock and how much went to advertising.

Nutshell:

He's wrong about a lack growth potential in the US because a bunch of my friends have joined.

Another round wouldn't be dilutive because our last round was so overvalued.

And yeah internet advertising hasn't really worked internationally - but we'll be okay because we're beefing up our sales staff over there.

And he is wrong because we're not going to make revenue because it would be bad for the user experience. Revenues be damned! We can make it as long as we have a great user experience!