What’s Cooking with Facebook’s Recent Growth?

TechCrunch reported data from comScore yesterday that Web traffic to Facebook is now nearing that of Yahoo!. The world’s largest social network has already surpassed Yahoo in monthly page views, and will soon overtake the search engine’s mark of more than 594 million unique visitors. eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson recently shed some light on Facebook’s future growth potential, revenue opportunities, and how marketers can take advantage.

eMarketer: Do you see Facebook continuing to experience its recent huge growth in the future?

Williamson: I do see significant growth potential for Facebook, especially in developing markets. I believe it is reaching saturation in its original dominant markets: the US, UK and Canada. But there are many countries where its user growth is still quite large.

Here’s one data resource that shows that:
Mapping Facebook’s Recent Global Growth Versus Rivals

eMarketer: If the site does continue to grow, can it generate enough revenue through advertising to offset the huge costs involved in supporting so many users?

Williamson: Advertising has been Facebook’s main revenue stream since its inception. But I believe that this year will be the year that we see the company opening up significant new revenue streams.

One of those will probably be virtual currency. Another might be e-commerce, in which Facebook could take a cut of sales from any person or company that sells something within Facebook.

In a few years, I believe another source of revenue for Facebook will be analytics–selling information about its users to marketers, agencies and others who are interested. Facebook is sitting on a gold mine of consumer information and I am certain it is trying to determine how to maximize the revenue potential from it–without invading its users’ privacy.

eMarketer: Do you think it’s likely that Facebook will go public anytime in the near future? Or should its focus remain on generating revenue through advertising and other streams?

Williamson: I believe that Facebook does not need to go public anytime soon. It has a deep-pocketed investor in DST, the Russian firm, and its advertising revenues are growing nicely. I expect that it will generate $605 million worldwide in ad revenue this year, up 39% over last year. If it succeeds in creating some of the new revenue streams I mentioned above, it will be doing very well.

Related:

• Facebook’s Revenue Trajectory
• Social Network Ad Spending Trends for 2010
• Students Still Find Facebook Cool
• Facebook Now Has Yahoo In Its Sites, Already Bigger In Pageviews (ComScore)
• Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media
• What Social Followers Want