What Could You Do With 200 Million Users? | Hacker News Reader

What Could You Do With 200 Million Users?

zachheller.com

7 pointszheller17 comments

200 million users is approximately, hmm, 1 million times more users than one needs to be ramen profitable, and one hundred thousand times more users than one needs to be quite wealthy, and ten thousand times more users than one needs to be filthy stinking rich, and yet still not enough for Facebook to be profitable.

Charge money.

People won't pay money for what facebook is right now.

However, I think a premium account model would be very lucrative for them.

But aren't they also commoditizing the infrastructure for scalable social sites? You can read, or watch videos, of their entire approach to the design and architecture of their systems. They are essentially doing the R&D and sharing it with everyone.

Also, they live on the fact that they make it easy for everyone to organize into social groups based on some kind of commonality. Well, what happens if that commonality is fighting against facebook charging for services? Or if people socialize into groups inviting people to move to another social site?

2000 users - "quite wealthy"?

How much net profit are you assuming you are taking in from these 2000 customers?

The day FB charges money for a premium account is the day all the competing networks start promoting their service as "100% free".

I think Zuck, and FB in general are stuck in the mindset that they want to 'change the world' with their application. Being profitable is simply uninteresting to them, just like picking up a nickel off the sidewalk is not worth the trouble for you and I (we have better things to do).

FB's stated goal is to have between 1-2 billion users, with lofty goals like that, making a little money now is a low priority.

If they plan on doing it (charging for some kind of account) I think they need to start soon. Facebook is already decaying into the sort of novelty/advert app, Hallmark gift shop mess that Myspace has been for years. A year from now their product will be alot harder to sell to the kind of people who would be willing to pay for it.

...Unless you could buy an account where you never had to see an ad or a third-party app of any kind, I might even pay for that.

Accountants: We're losing more money with every new user

Zuck: We'll make it up with volume!

Investors: OK

Funny joke, but didn't FB say they would be profitable in 2010?

The outgoing CFO said they would be cash flow positive in 2010, but who knows how advertising projections will hold up? It's kind of a down market at the moment.

He could have simply meant they plan to stop buying $100m of servers every year next year and as a consequence won't run a net loss. Or it could just be the fired CFO talking nonsense. Who knows really?

I'll tell you what I'd do, man: two chicks at the same time, man. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I had 200 million users, I could hook that up, too; 'cause chicks dig geeks with a large userbase.

monetize them

It's no mystery how facebook is going to monetize their users -- by advertising. It's what they've been doing since a few months after their launch.

There was an interview with marc andreessen a couple months ago, and he plainly said that facebook could become a billion dollar company if it turned on aggressive advertising. But it's trying to figure out the most effective way to advertise without alienating users.

don't be so sure, all the people I know who tried their hand at advertising on facebook all say that the site converts like crap.

Agreed. It's also hard to get good metrics if you want to use something other than Facebook's tools. Hard to beat Google at this game when they do both the advertising and the analytics better than anyone else.

What do you do that has users, and what would you do with 200M of them?

Change the world.

/for the better I would hope

Take over a country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com