In an interview with Bloomberg, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to expand its staff by 50 percent this year. Nobody else is hiring, Zuckerberg claims, so there’s a surplus of engineers on the market, and Facebook has big plans ahead, which will require some fresh blood.
“The thing I want to remind people of is we’re way closer to the beginning than the end,” he said. That may very well be true, but one has to remember that a lot of the money at Facebook’s disposal doesn’t come from revenue, it comes from investments. And Facebook had already spent a tidy sum this year on its FriendFeed acquisition.
Facebook has big expectations for this year’s revenue. Board member Marc Andreessen said the revenue for 2009 should reach $500 million; COO Sheryl Sandberg said it should grow 70 percent compared to 2008. Since Facebook’s financials aren’t public, we can’t be sure what the numbers for 2008 really were (Facebook’s own projections from January 2008. were at 300 – 350 million dollars).
There’s one area where Facebook has no problems: growth. We’ve been following it closely, and it’s been phenomenal; even after surpassing MySpace in pretty much all aspects (traffic, number of users, time spent on site), it hasn’t stalled for a second.
Zuckerberg claims the company’s goal is to have a billion users; in July, we reported that Facebook has added 50 million new users in only 30 months. It doesn’t feel like a recession year at Facebook, but to justify the planned staff expansion, Facebook will also have to hit its revenue targets; otherwise it’ll have to turn to investors for another cash injection.
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