In a market where there's a tendency toward centralization, what matters is the percentage of users you have, not the absolute number. Facebook only passed Myspace in traffic last month. Surely it's at least reasonable to believe the threshold for when to put revenue first might be in the future.
Do you have to be the #1 in a sector to make a lot of money though?
Plentyoffish has just overtaken match as top dating site in the US - some parallels with facebook. Difference is, plentyoffish has been massively profitable for years... Why hasn't facebook? Do they need 10,000+ servers and all those staff? The big fancy expensive offices?
Facebook seems like a tech bubble in itself to me.
Zuckerberg is taking the road less traveled. Most sane people would have cashed out $100MM and walked away as soon as they could have. I would have.
He's trying to turn Facebook into a billion+/year revenue company by utilizing an as of yet proven (or identified?) business model.
Worst case scenario is that he could do what MySpace did. Put horrible ads all over the site and milk it for everything it's worth. Should turn profit if they then cut back on spending (and fire 80% of their staff).
