Facebook Hits 1 Billion Users, Here's How It Hits $141 Billion in Value
Facebook looks weak right now. Its stock is in the dumps. Wall Street, up in arms. Maybe the social network will just muddle along for another decade, its users apathetic, its revenue merely steady, its stock barely appreciating. That’s a possible future for the company. But all that runs counter to the announcement today that Facebook has eclipsed 1 billion users.
That’s a huge number, and within it lies the fuel for a much sunnier future for Facebook, one in which the company fulfills some of the outsized expectations foisted on it, in which it lives up to the potential that got everyone so excited about it just a few short years ago. Facebook has shown it is a hugely disruptive force in how people communicate with one another. But it may yet show it can disrupt advertising, where it makes its money, search and e-commerce, where it has shown a strong interest, and any number of other businesses where its trove of personal information on its hundreds of millions of members could prove useful.
