Facebook revenue to be “billions” in 5 years: board member
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook will likely be posting billions of dollars in revenue in five years, up from about $500 million this year, according to Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen who sits on Facebook's board.
Context & Ripple Effects
Marc Andreessen's forecast — roughly $500 million in revenue for 2009 scaling to "billions" within five years — carries weight precisely because he sits on Facebook's board rather than merely backing it, making it the closest thing to official guidance a private company can offer.
The projection lands on top of groundwork Facebook laid through June and early July 2009: a tested publisher tool that defaults status updates to a public "everyone" option, the Live Stream Box experiment with CNN during the presidential inauguration, and stated privacy principles built on control, simplicity and connection. Together they sketch the mechanism behind the number — wider public sharing feeding the ad inventory a board member is now underwriting.
First-order effects
- Brand advertisers get an explicit, board-sourced growth trajectory for the platform, converting Facebook's ~$500 million 2009 run-rate from speculation into a stated baseline against which ad spend can be planned.
- As a private company with no quarterly disclosures, Facebook's insiders, employees and prospective investors gain a concrete yardstick — billions by roughly 2014 — for valuing the business between funding events.
Second-order effects
- With a revenue bar now set publicly from the boardroom, feature work like the "everyone"-default publisher stops being product polish and becomes monetization infrastructure, raising internal stakes on every sharing-surface change Facebook ships.
- The imminent iPhone app version 3.0 submission to Apple ties the forecast to mobile distribution: the audience the ad model needs to hit billions increasingly lives on Apple's platform, making that relationship commercially load-bearing.
Third-order effects
- If board members start underwriting revenue trajectories in public, private consumer-internet companies face pressure toward something closer to public-cadence financial transparency, changing how social-network scale is judged beyond raw user counts.
- The tension Facebook itself flagged in early July 2009 — defaulting sharing toward "everyone" while insisting trust rests on control and simplicity — becomes the structural constraint on the ad-revenue curve Andreessen projects: the same design choices driving inventory also drive the privacy backlash risk.
The trend: Social networks are shifting from user-growth stories to media-scale revenue stories, with board-level forecasts substituting for the disclosures private companies do not yet make.