It seems like Facebook is fishing for some money, Tech Crunch reports that the CFO of Facebook was in Dubai last week to explore potential investment opportunities with Dubai International Capital. I was surprised when I read this, I mean Microsoft invested almost $500 million in the site, and since they have a really good traffic, I though they are earning a lot of advertising money, apparently not.
According to the report, Facebook is hunting for opportunities outside the USA, probably because of the financial crisis, the funny part is that Facebook was blocked earlier this year in the UAE for a while, however it’s expected to witness a partial block next year, who knows, it might not if it became a Dubai-product.
But what is the reason behind this? The report suggests that the high running costs are the motive, here are some interesting numbers and facts about Facebook:
Traffic:
161 million unique monthly visitors
61 billion monthly page views ~ that is huge!
Take a look at the number of users on Facebook and other social networking sites
Expenditures:
$1 million per month on electricity ~ no way, that’s too much!
$500,000 per month on bandwidth
$100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next
$30 million this year on storage systems
$15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments
$10 million per month on payroll of 750 employees ~ too much?
