It took how many users for Facebook to become cash flow positive?

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Facebook recently announced two significant milestones:

• They crossed 300 million users worldwide
• They are now cash flow positive (they were EBIDTA positive).

Given the size of the network, it amazes me that it took that many users for them to become cash flow positive. There have been many discussions about how Facebook needs to discover new ways to monetize their base but having to get to 300m users to become CF positive is mind boggling.Granted the following shows their extreme cost structure:

From Techcrunch: The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week (me: like to be that sales rep) just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly – we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake – earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

One of the difficulties cited to becoming CF positive was the huge amount of photos that are uploaded and stored on Facebook. However, I do not see the growth in uploads of pictures decreasing any time soon so how do they continue to scale (even with Haystack) and have the corresponding revenues to stay positive? What if utilization rates of users drop off making it harder to attract advertising (already limited). How do they keep adding people and keep up usage? How do they generate more revenue/user? It will be interesting to watch. Any one else have any thoughts?

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• Bret Taylor: Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users. Oh Yeah, And Their Cash Flow Just Went Positive (techcrunch.com)