Facebook sandbagging revenue; 2011 really $12B, not $4B

I found the suggestions spot-on and highly conventional for a typical web property and I suspect that FB is already working on some of those...<p>But I also found the suggestions to kind of miss the point of FB (and I'm not an avid FBer). FB has found or is trying to find the right balance of engagement and advertising (cue the digerati: privacy! privacy! privacy! cue the interconsumers: meh...). The article kind of suggests that the balance is both obvious and easy to strike, but, having friends in management at FB, I've heard that it's nothing like that easy. It's easy to look around the web, find big properties/segments (e.g. AdSense, YouTube, news) and then paint on an FB layer; it's quite a bit harder to do so at massive scale without pissing off or freaking out the consumer market and other web properties.

What a load of crap.... They don't earn as much as they do because they don't spam every possible place with additional advertising and not competing directly with groupon, youtube, foursquare and google, duh!<p>Just to 'replicate' a basic functionality of the sites above it would take them lots of time and effort and really not guaranteed to become anything interesting.<p>And adding way more adds? Really? Well, I suppose they could get away with it for a while, but I'm sure it would kill lots of other important metrics, like user engagement etc. Which I suppose are not less critical for FB then just the bottom line.

Not monetizing to their potential? Sure, I'll buy that.<p>Underplaying it to the tune of $8B+ per year? Yeah, no sale.<p>If FB was really making that much money, why would they still be raising venture rounds (eg the Goldman investment)? If it was so the founder and early investors could take money off the table, why would they be undervaluing the sale? It would either be not smart for the founders or arguably misrepresentation to the investors.<p>I maintain my view that FB is still in the hype phase. Pricing will come back to earth at some point, which isn't to say it's not an $XX billion company but the $2B+ they've raised does raise questions about their actual and potential revenue.<p>Remember that Google raised $20-25M and that was it, as just one data point (but a common point of comparison).

how can they be sandbagging if they have never published revenues

Sounds like Launch wants FB to end the party at 11.

fbvideo.com? really?