Is Facebook facing a cash crunch?
p2pnet news view | Advertising:- Are you a Facebook translator? And if you are, how much is the company paying you?
“We thought it’d be cool,” said Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook in April.
“Our goal would be to hopefully have one day everybody on the planet on Facebook.”
And one of the ways it hopes to do that is to get users to do all the translating, said p2pnet.
For free.
Now, says TechCrunch, “There’s no doubt that Facebook is growing at a breathtaking pace.”
A year ago, according to Comscore, “they had just 74 million unique monthly visitors and 35 billion page views. Today those numbers have grown by 118% and 74%, respectively, to 161 million unique visitors and 61 billion page views per month.”
Who’s responsible?
All those, “user-created translated versions of the site” which have, “probably exceeded even their own internal projections,” says the story.
But that doesn’t mean everything in the garden is rosy.
“It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook,” says TechCrunch, “But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.”
What to do? What to DO?
“Sources have told us that Facebook CFO Gideon Yu was in Dubai this week, possibly meeting with Dubai International Capital, exploring fundraising options,” says the story, adding:
“U.S. investors, including VCs and hedge funds, aren’t interested or aren’t able to invest at the valuation Facebook expects. That leaves Sovereign Wealth Funds as the only viable funding solution. And the window to get money from them may fast be closing, too.
“Which explains why Facebook may be looking for money sooner rather than later. If they don’t raise a big chunk of money now from someone who’ll pay whatever it takes to own a piece of Facebook, there may be a heavily dilutive down-valuation round for Facebook in the next 12-18 months.”
p2pnet – Facebook translates users into $,April 21, 2008
TechCrunch – Facebook May Be Growing Too Fast. And Hitting The Capital Markets Again, October 31, 2008
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October 31st, 2008 at 7:02 pm
facebook is a datamine I refuse to be apart of. People are addicted to it like crack. Some even get arrested or charged for comments they made on it. I hope it falls through, that way I can laugh harder at the people who think its a tool for freedom of speech.