SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook Incorporated, the world’s most popular social-networking service, is likely to generate 2010 revenue of about $2bn, a larger sum than projected earlier, according to three people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.Sales will more than double from 2009, said the people, who declined to be identified because the privately held company doesn’t disclose its revenue.Facebook had $700m to $800m in sales last year, and the 2010 figure was previously expected to be closer to $1.5bn, according to two other people familiar with the matter earlier this year.Facebook’s more than half a billion users have made it an attractive target for advertisers, including Coca-Cola Company, JPMorgan Chase & Company and Adidas AG. In October, Facebook surpassed Yahoo! Incorporated when ranked by the number of global users, making it number three behind Google Incorporated and Microsoft Corporporation, according to ComScore Incorporaton, a research firm in Reston, Virginia.“The love affair of consumers with social networks is an abiding one,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC in San Mateo, California. “All the big brands are there.”Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, declined to comment.Facebook, founded in 2004, would reach $2bn faster than Yahoo and at almost the same pace as Google. Yahoo, founded in 1994, posted revenue of $1.6bn in 2003 and $3.6bn in 2004. Google, founded in 1998, reached $1.5bn in 2003 and $3.2bn in 2004.Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive officer, was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” on Thursday. The publication noted his role in “creating a new system of exchanging information” and “changing how we all live our lives.”Zuckerberg, 26, created Facebook for college students when he was a sophomore at Harvard University. After opening the site to people outside of higher education, the company surpassed News Corporation’s MySpace, as the number one social network two years ago. Facebook users now post a billion pieces of content, such as photos and messages, every day, Time said.Facebook has maintained ad prices, even as its user growth creates a surge of space for commercial messages, the company said in August. Facebook also makes money from a credit program, which lets people buy virtual items in online games.“People are learning and they’re figuring out how they can work with Facebook,” said Christian Juhl, a president at digital ad agency Razorfish, part of Paris-based Publicis Groupe SA. “You can prove success without a massive expenditure.”Facebook is making gains in so-called display ads -- the banners, videos and other graphical promotions that appear on websites. It may grab about 9.4 per cent of that market in the US this year, up from 6.6 percent in 2009, according to EMarketer Inc. in New York.Yahoo, which leads the market, will have about 16.2 per cent, down from 16.5 per cent, the firm estimates. Google, which is stronger in Internet-search ads, may take 6.7 per cent, up from 4.7 per cent.Facebook’s growth is also attracting investor interest. The company has a valuation of $43.1bn, according to SharesPost Incorporated, an exchange for privately held stocks. That’s up more than 60 per cent from three months ago and almost quadruple the level in March.At the same time, Facebook’s expansion has increased concerns about privacy. After lawmakers and advocacy groups complained that it shares too much personal data, the company introduced simpler privacy controls in May and said it was reducing the amount of user information that’s publicly available.“They’ve done a better job recently around privacy, which alleviates a lot of the concern,” Juhl said. “That’s something we’ll always have to keep watching. But that’s nothing new -- whether it’s Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or Facebook.”
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