Facebook has revealed at the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco that not only has it reached a monthly active user quantity of 300 million but it has started to make money ahead of schedule. Not expected to gain profit until 2010, founder Mark Zuckerberg said “This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term. We are succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. We are just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone,” he said before adding “We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web.”
Hitting 250,000 active users in July, predictions estimate average new users a week equalling five million. AllFacebook.com’s Nick O’Neill expressed “That Facebook is able to continue this growth and build a “cash-flow positive” business is an impressive feat. If the company can cover the cost of scaling to one billion users and still manage to break even, there’s no doubt that the company will have a great opportunity to rake in billions.”
Vice president of engineering for Facebook Mike Schroepfer said that it had taken a lot of effort to start the profit rolling in. “The growth of the network has certainly helped us go cash-positive and the engineering team has done a lot of innovation on our ad products, as our business is primarily advertising-funded,” he said adding, “As more and more of the world gets on the network, people and advertisers realise the power of sharing information, whether it’s about a movie preview or a car.”
