Facebook Runs a Profit

I thought this was an interesting read about how Facebook, for the first time in its years running, is actually running a profit. The announcement was made last Tuesday. (Yeah I realize I’m about 6 days behind the world here in Thailand.) :

Facebook’s user base is nearly as large as the U.S. population and, for the first time, the site has turned a profit.

That was the double-barreled announcement Tuesday from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who thanked the site’s users for helping its online community cross the 300 million threshold. There are about 307 million people living in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“We’re just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone,” Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s blog.

“Because we want to make it as easy and fast as possible for the world to connect, one of the things we think a lot about is how to make Facebook perform even faster and more efficiently as we grow,” he wrote. “We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the Web.”

This is great in that it’s giving us more consumers to advertise to (at the note of about 800,000 per day). However, I think I know why they kicked my off their platform. With profit, they probably don’t need my internet monies. Anyways, another interesting point in the article -

About 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the U.S., according to statistics posted by the company. The site started out as a portal for college students but has attracted the attention of baby boomers and older generations in recent years. Facebook says its fastest-growing demographic is people older than 35.

So, get on your affiliate network managers and ask them what is hot for people older than 35 not living in the United States. There is a huge market that isn’t in the United States, and well, a lot of people are missing out on a significant amount of revenue because of that. As networks and advertisers get better hold of this concept, we’ll certainly see more affiliate offers being brought up to our attention.

You can finish reading the article for yourself at CNN here.