Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Tuesday, and declined to confirm recent reports that the company had held discussions regarding $150 million in funding (as reported by VentureBeat) and turned down $200 million (as reported by TechCrunch).
He basically said that Facebook is fine with the money it has. “If there’s an investment to be done on very good terms, we will consider it if for no other reason than to have more buffer if we want to do something in the future,” he said at the event.
He also said that he hopes an IPO is in order, but that it won’t happen for a few years according to Reuters. There is no rush on that.
“I know for a lot of companies the IPO is the endpoint or the goal. For us it will be an event on the path to where [we] want to get eventually,” Reuters quotes him.
Zuckerberg also mentioned the possibility of the company developing an ad network. “You can see over time us wanting to offer more ways for people to monetize their site and help out with that, and it could be a pretty natural extension for us to do something with ads or a number of other things that we’ve considered.”
Speaking of monetization, Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has an interesting post up about how Facebook might one day monetize the open stream API, which was opened up to developers a while back. He lists the following three ways as possibilities:
1. Selling targeting data
2. In-stream virtual currency transactions
3. Selling tools and reports
Yesterday, All Facebook claimed to have data showing that Facebook has surpassed 225 million users. Compete data showed that the network had 104 unique visitors and over 1.6 billion visits in April.
