First half of 2011 saw revenue of Facebook doubling up to $1.6 billion, as it was told to Reuters by a source with knowledge of Facebook’s financials. This announcement underscored Facebook’s appeal to advertisers as it continues to grapple intensified competition from Google Inc. and others. For the net income, during this period, was almost $500 million which was again quoted by a source who remained anonymous as privately-held Facebook usually do not disclose its results.
Private markets are seeing the strong results of Facebook which have only strengthened up since their valuation which was done last time. Currently, investors are valuing Facebook to roughly $80 billion. Many industry observers are even expecting that the social networking giant will go public in 2012.
Facebook has undoubtedly been a hit among the advertisers and its gaining popularity among them might be one of the crucial points which got CEO of Yahoo! Inc. Carol Bartz out of her job on Tuesday.
Talking about Google+, it is for now a clean social networking site which means that
advertiser count there would be really low, in fact insignificantly low. But it was launched in June this year, and grew quickly to 10 million count for users and for the time taken to reach this mark, it was just two weeks, which is remarkable. Facebook has a potential rival in Google+, even though the count for the users on Facebook is 750+ million and the ideal ratio is almost opposite for the two in most of the countries with a Facebook account remaining ideal rarely. Google+ even has attempted to lure users with the introduction of games such as Zynga Poker and Rovio’s Angry Birds. Some industry experts and venture capitalists are of the thought that Google+ is taking up right steps to chunk a significant bite out of Facebook.
However, coming back to Facebook, the net income recorded by the company in the first nine months of 2010 was $355 million was on the revenue share of $1.2 billion. This has been recorded according to the documents which were provided by Goldman Sachs to their clients during a share offering this year. The first half figures could not be compared as the relevant details were not given.
Facebook of late has had many other inputs for many to know and one of the was the inclusion of music services from Rhapsody and Spotify, which would be a subscribed form of flow into the social networking site. This may have a reason that Facebook is a site where people spend hours and days every month, updating statuses, liking them and sharing videos and photos while getting into a conversation with friends. Easily, Facebook is one of the Web’s most visited destinations.
Talking about the all Internet display advertisement, Facebook accounts for almost one-third impressions in U.S. in June. This was noted by the analytics firm comScore. Interestingly, the count in all of Facebook is more than the tally of impressions via Yahoo, Microsoft Corp, Google and AOL Inc combined. In the current $1.6 billion of revenue estimated for the first six months of this year, the portion received from advertising sales cannot be bifurcated as of now.
For the financial results, Facebook declines to make a comment.
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