[broofa]

@blantoni: You can find Facebook data center cost data here: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/09/16/faceb...

You'd have to 10X those costs (to $500M/yr), plus assume a 250% overhead (another $500M) on top of your $200M salary and benefits figure for Facebook to be in the red.

Calling that plausible would seem a bit of a stretch.

[blantonl]

Did you actually read that article? That is lease cost for their data centers (in 2009 no less). That's basically just paying the rent on their data centers.

That doesn't include a 200 million dollar data center project to be built in Pineville, OR. And that does not include infrastructure, bandwidth, software, hardware maintenance etc.

Let's face it, Facebook does not sell a product. Their only current viable revenue model is through advertising.

[ceejayoz]

> That doesn't include a 200 million dollar data center project to be built in Pineville, OR.

Which will, in the long run, be dramatically cheaper than leasing space - which has all the same costs, plus a middleman to pay, minus the efficiencies of an entirely custom setup.

[jfarmer]

The $200MM for the datacenter is amortized over that datacenter's lifetime.