eMarketer estimates $265 million in revenue for Facebook in 2008. That’s great, right? Well, not really. The company is still losing money - lots of it - at current revenues. And it’s not clear that revenue will grow as robustly as costs.
Most of Facebook’s growth is outside of the U.S. A year ago, according to Comscore, Facebook had 31 million U.S. visitors, about 42% of the total. Today, U.S. visitors have grown to just 41 million.
19 million live in Africa and the Middle East. 26 million are in Asia. Europe, with 48 million Facebook users, has a larger share than the U.S. Another 16 million are in Latin America.
Just one in four Facebook users come from the U.S. today.
As we wrote last summer, most of these international users can’t be monetized today. And to make things worse, bandwidth costs in those countries is generally much higher than the U.S. So the users cost more, and they don’t bring in any revenue.
That international growth might be ok if U.S. growth remained strong. But the U.S. market just seems to be tapped at this point, and gaining market share from MySpace is a battle. As we wrote in August, at current growth rates it will take Facebook 18 years to overtake MySpace in the U.S.
