Everyone says this, and meanwhile we're watching companies with huge user bases flounder around helplessly without finding a way.
I think it's time we stop taking that for the gospel and admit that it's actually quite possible for a company to get a huge user base and still fail to make money permanently.
I'm very interested to see this play out. Pop wisdom says with enough eyes and with low enough operating costs there will be some way to make it as a company.
But there has to be an inflection point somewhere. Look at youtube, they will never be in the black (taken on their own).
So either they turn a profit, and this piece of wisdom is strongly reinforced. Or they go under, and entrepreneurs and VCs lose a certain glint in their eye. Or they get bought... and probably no one's mind is changed.
This explains why they turned off IM access. No need to view the web pages, and no ad views, via IM. And people will respond better to ads on web pages than ads via IM.
Facebook makes hundreds of millions annually. They could have been very profitable years ago (but chose instead to try for an even bigger hit). I don't know why people on this site keep talking about Facebook like it's a failed business.
