Like anyone on Facebook, I’m sure you have seen panic pages and spam about Facebook is going to start charging. I don’t think to many people stop and think when they see this. Well, ok.. they think, but not about the right things. I’m pretty sure they think ‘I’m not paying!’. Well they would be right, you wont. And not because you joined some group or liked a page. Read on to see why Facebook  will never start charging for their service.

Faceboook is a private company, and rather tight lipped about how much money they are making. According to Inside Facebook, revenues likely reached between $600 million and $700 million for 2009. They don’t need a monthly fee from you.

Where did this money come from?

I will start simple. Advertisements. Any time you see an ad, Facebook gets paid. Anytime you click on, Facebook gets paid. That’s the same with any web site that has ads on it. When you see “Steve is a fan of Mandy Madrox” (Shoosh!) Facebook does not get paid for you to view it or click it. (This is when they random in what your friends are fans of for filler.)  How ever they would get paid if someone with a fan page decided to buy advertising to show that ad to all of Facebook.

Virtual goods, where you buy credits to get a ‘virtual gift’ for your friend and send it to them. I never have, have you?

Games. Companies like Zynga pay Facebook to promote and display the games we love to play. Look at this URL carefully. http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/index.php When you load this URL, Farmville loads up. A common assumption is that Facebook has these games on their servers. They don’t. This page has several lines of code that call up the game from Zynga’s servers. So the page you load it self, is on Facebook’s servers, and Zynga paid for it to be set up like this. They pay for the entire integration of their games into the Facebook site. This applies to any games your playing. The developing game company has paid Facebook.

Why do they pay? Ever buy Farmville cash or gold? According to this web site, Zynga made $250 million in gross revenues in 2009.

Any company that has service integrated into Facebook. Paid.

Now before you start to think all this money goes into Facebook’s creator’s pockets. Keep in mind, Facebook has offices in Palo Alto, California, Dublin, Ireland (international headquarters for Europe, Africa, Middle East) Seoul, and South Korea (international headquarters for Asia). They have 1200+ employees. According to , datacenterknowledge.com Facebook has 30,000 servers (As of 2009) supporting its operations. All of this, do I really need to say this? Costs them money.