I'm not going to make a comment on whether or not FB can be profitable... but here is some doom and gloom comedy if you believe we're in a monsoon of a shit storm:

Employers will cut staff, trim the fat, and leave only the super productive. Businesses will put a stop on productivity leaks, this means the 18-20 people on my FB buddy list (99% of which have graduated) at 1pm on a Thursday will have to call it quits, or lose their job.

College students will be faced with a credit squeeze, halt their $30-40 a month @home internet and return to using school provided connectivity, making them a far less connected market.

Fb traffic declines, advertising expenditures are cut... Fb and Pets.com become soul mates.

Just kidding... :)

OR... because the job market is in the crapper, kids will extend their college visits, giving them several more years to waste networking on sites like FB, thereby keeping FB's valuation high and their profits coming when the markets rebound just in time for their "revenue plan"

That assumes they have access to credit and loans to extend their hiatus. :)

We're now in a recession and branding budgets are almost always the first things that big companies cut. This is Facebook's bread & butter. Facebook will need to make some heavy cuts if they plan on searching for another three years.

> We're now in a recession and branding budgets are almost always the first things that big companies cut.

Does/will Coke cut its branding budget?

I think that there are very few companies with valuable brands. (Sony might have one, but how many people buy something because it says Pioneer on the box?) The rest may have some name recognition, but that doesn't move much product.

> Does/will Coke cut its branding budget?

Yes, of course. They all do. When you have less demand and people have less disposable income, you tend to put more money into measurable advertising that can directly impact the bottom line. I think you'll agree that Coke's brand is safe and as Buffett says, the moat is very, very wide indeed so to them, cutting branding budget will not show any impact for at least 2-3 quarters.

Coke is almost 100% a branding company. The sugary water distribution and manufacture is franchised in most territories.

It does say

"In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is."

There is a difference between being not profitable, and being optimally profitable.

*started with the wrong markup

Last week I tried to buy some FB ads ... couldn't get past the setup/purchase screens (was improperly validating my info).

Do I have to wait 3 years for that to work?

Current business plan (apparently only slightly facetious):

1. Get everybody on Facebook 2. Create a huge map detailing how everybody relates to everybody else. 3. ???? 4. Profit

I always figured that there were smarter people than me working on step 3, but maybe there weren't.

Maps of the non-social kind are useful because they can be bought and used to get to places you've never been to. Maps of the social kind are apparently useless because everybody wants their privacy and you're basically left with a map telling you where you are and what's within two steps walking distance.

I'm going to call it right here right now: Facebook will be irrelevant 3 years from now.

Why do you say that? Do you think people are going to lose interest in the things they do on Facebook, or do you think a new competitor is going to provide a product sufficiently better than Facebook to take over the market?

There are few people that I would rather see fall into a fiery downfall of fail more than Zuckerberg. Maybe he'll wise up and take the cash before it's too late.

Zuckerburg and Facebook as a business might fail, but it's still used by MILLIONS of college students all over. If Zuckerburg can't make a business out of millions of eyeballs, somebody will buy their husk of an indebted corpse and take a shot at it.

Yeah. I can't see Facebook going down without a massive fight.

Why? Zuckerberg has done what a lot of us want to: write code that is used by millions of people and earns us billions of dollars.

It already is too late. That is fantastic.

I would love to see Facebook, and particularly Zuckerberg, razed to the ground by this economic crisis.

Yay for the economic crisis.

Why would you want to see that?

Perhaps it's still too early to tell, but this certainly does read a bit differently now than it did when I wrote it two years ago.

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/letter

let it go

Yeah. That's history by now. Give it a rest.

Two points:

A) Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

B) The point of my posting the link wasn't to remind anyone of the personal history. It was that as a business decision, Facebook not accepting Yahoo's buyout offer looked brilliant in 2006 and 2007, but now looks questionable (at best). Who knows what Yahoo can or can't afford at this point, let alone $100 per user.

I think Zuckerberg is pretty adamantly against selling. Money or no money, he's currently got the keys to the one web site that every college student is coming to rely on. That gives him a lot of power, and it gives him a lot of leeway with trying to make money. So, as of right now, he's still in a pretty good position.

Three years?!