News is being reported on the BBC Technology website regarding several aspects of Facebook"s growth into a much greater entity. An announcement at TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco, a conference for start ups, reveals another leap in "active" monthly users of Facebook. The site now has over 300 million users and recently celebrated its 250 million user milestone back in July; it is is being estimated to be gaining around 5 million new users, weekly.
Facebook is also reporting that it has begun to generate income, ahead of its schedule, and is expected to begin turning a profit sometime next year. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the site, commented on this news on a blog post.
"This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term, we are succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. We are just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone. We face a lot of fun and important challenges that require rethinking the current systems for enabling information flow across the web."
Facebook"s Mr. Schroepfer has said that the company has worked hard to get more money flowing in than out. "The growth of the network has certainly helped us go cash-positive and the engineering team has done a lot of innovation on our ad products, as our business is primarily advertising-funded."
Nick O"Neill of AllFacebook.com has also commented on this news, stating that he believes that if the company can cover the cost of scaling to one billion users and maintain itself, there is no reason as to why billions cannot be earned from the website.