Privately owned Facebook doesn"t officially reveal its financial numbers but a new report from Reuters states that the social networking service is doing pretty well when it comes to bringing in money. The report, which cites unnamed sources, claims that Facebook has generated a whopping $1.6 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2011. That"s double the amount the company brought in for the same time period in 2010.
The article doesn"t go into details on how much of the revenue came from ads that are run on the Facebook site. In addition to ad money, the company also generates revenues with a 30 percent cut of all virtual item sales from games run on Facebook. That includes the massively successful games that are developed and published by Zynga. Facebook has officially admitted that it has over 750 million registered users worldwide. Despite new competition from Google"s recently launched Google+ service, Facebook continues to gain visitors. In July Comscore said that Facebook had its largest amount of unique visitors to date at its web site; 155 million; in August the company broke the 1 trillion page view mark.
It"s highly expected that Facebook will finally make the plunge in 2012 and launch a public stock offering that could raise the company"s market value up to $80 billion. It also continues to launch new products and features. Later this month Facebook is expected to add some kind of music service to the site. However, it"s not afraid to shut down projects; last month it closed its Facebook Deals program after just four months.