In just over a year's time, Facebook has doubled its user base. Now, the social networking site now has more than 300 million users the company said at TechCrunch50 today. And with that size increase comes the company's first cash profit, which it also announced today.
Facebook has been a profitable business for nearly a year, but it didn't expect to start pulling in a cash surplus until 2010 due to investments and acquisitions.
The service's growth rate has been nothing short of astonishing, and AllFacebook, the unofficial Facebook blog, actually predicted this 300 million milestone based on its new member acquisition pace from the beginning of this year. It was estimated that 450,000 new users -- roughly equal to the entire population of Kansas City -- were signing up every day.
"The site we all use every day is built by a relatively small group of the smartest engineers and entrepreneurs who are solving substantial problems and each making a huge impact for the 300 million people using Facebook," said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today, "In fact, the ratio of Facebook users to Facebook engineers makes it so that every engineer here is responsible for more than one million users. It's hard to have an impact like that anywhere else."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
