Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of facebook, blogged on September 15 that it has offically reached 300 million users of the worlds largest social network ever. Also, the company was not expecting positive cash flow until around the year 2010, but thanks to projects like Haystack, Facebook was able to cut spending. Haystack as well as other projects aim to cut the costs of sharing photo storage on websites. Facebook also claims the title of being the largest photo-sharing site as well. Most of the companies spending goes towards equipment for big storage servers which can be extremely expensive.
Jeff Rothschild is Facebook's VP of Technology explained in detail at a MySQL user conferences in 2007, that Facebook is now running 10,000 servers, including 1,800 MySQL servers. The costs for these servers are not cheap. In a study done in 2007 by Deft Labs, their goal was to figure out about how much money Facebook spends in one year. if we are to assume that each server has 4 GB of memory, Facebook would need 19 TB of profile data, which will cost roughly $5,000,000. Also, in order for Facebook to run, they need servers. Assuming they have 5,000 servers the total cost would be around $1,000,000 per year to host them (not including bandwidth - including bandwidth would be an extra cost of approximately $184,320). Running a business requires hiring employees. Assuming that each platform (admins, managers, engineers, etc) would cost Facebook $18,000,000 to pay its workers. The total cost for one year would be a little over 24 million dollars.
Facebook is now making money as of 2009. Since Facebook is one of the most visited sites, they can charge a lot of money for companies to put ads. A lot of big companies are willing to pay the fees to have themselves advertised on the site allowing Facebook to make a lot of money. In fact, in 2006 Yahoo was in serious talks about buying Facebook for 1 billion dollars. Facebook turned down the offer.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/facebook-crosses-300-million-users-oh-yeah-and-their-cash-flow-just-went-positive/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/09/15/tech/cnettechnews/main5313658.shtml
2 comments:
Hi Doug,
So is it the number of servers that is allowing them to make the profit or is there something that these servers can do together or the total volume they can handle? Also, please site at least TWO places where you got your information from.
hey Doug,
I also read this article i cant believe just one company deals with this volume on the day to day basis.
they use a lot of technology, power,and man hours to make it work as smoothly as it does. but they also need some help with the site too like protecting people's Privacy. i found this article about this idea
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23405/
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