The overall sentiment of your post is correct...you can run a social network cheaper than FB if you're not concerned about profit(note that PBC is still "for profit").
> How much, per user, does it really cost to run a social network now? Not much.
That's a broad brush.
> Hosting is so cheap that Atlantic will rent you a full-time virtual machine for $0.99/month.
If you're serious about uptime/failover/any sort of SLA this figure is totally meaningless.
> A majority of Google's headcount is ad sales reps.
Because they produce the revenue :)
> The main search engine, a few years ago, was developed and run by about 90 people
Their salaries are minuscule compared to the millions/billions it takes to keep the datacenters that serve search running. Not to mention that the 90 people figure doesn't(can't) include things like network engineers, hardware engineers, capacity, provisioning, monitoring, cloud infra, etc. There are LOTS of supporting actors that aren't directly on the "search" team.
This is the beauty of technology. The size of the engineering team does not scale linearly with the size of the userbase. e.g. you can have a relatively small team of engineers write code that is used by billions of people. In contrast, a sales team will scale linearly with revenue. More sales people = more revenue, all other things being equal. Thus you see large sales headcounts at these companies pushing ads to people.
> How much, per user, does it really cost to run a social network now? Not much.
That's a broad brush.
> Hosting is so cheap that Atlantic will rent you a full-time virtual machine for $0.99/month.
If you're serious about uptime/failover/any sort of SLA this figure is totally meaningless.
> A majority of Google's headcount is ad sales reps.
Because they produce the revenue :)
> The main search engine, a few years ago, was developed and run by about 90 people
Their salaries are minuscule compared to the millions/billions it takes to keep the datacenters that serve search running. Not to mention that the 90 people figure doesn't(can't) include things like network engineers, hardware engineers, capacity, provisioning, monitoring, cloud infra, etc. There are LOTS of supporting actors that aren't directly on the "search" team.
This is the beauty of technology. The size of the engineering team does not scale linearly with the size of the userbase. e.g. you can have a relatively small team of engineers write code that is used by billions of people. In contrast, a sales team will scale linearly with revenue. More sales people = more revenue, all other things being equal. Thus you see large sales headcounts at these companies pushing ads to people.