Facebook revenue to be "billions" in 5 years: report

San Francisco
The Economic Times
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.

Andreessen said that the world's most popular online social network could pile up $1 billion in revenue this year if it pushed harder on selling advertising.

But he added that it was more important at this stage for social sites like Facebook and Twitter to retain and grow their user base and capture market share, rather than worry too much about making lots of money right away.

"This calendar year they'll do over $500 million," Andreessen said in an interview, noting that Facebook has more than 225 million users, so revenue per user is still small.

"If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year," said Andreessen, who made the cover of Time Magazine as founder of the world's first Web browser company, Netscape.