I disagree with the framing of the back of the envelop calculation.
First of all, that’s revenue, not profit. Looking at revenue is meaningless since it’s easy to take in lots of money and still be in the red.
Secondly, a competitor to Facebook does not need to have facebook’s profitability in order for it to be a viable business model.
By your analysis we can look Twitter and gry get the amount of money that people would have to pay to Mastadon in order for Mastadon to be a competitor. Except that the analogy breaks down because because the underlying technology is different. I won’t be paying server fees to “Mastadon” I’d be paying to an instance.
Likewise, wow google drive for sending large files to people needs a lot of servers. Or, we set something up torrent style and then there is no separate server.
First of all, that’s revenue, not profit. Looking at revenue is meaningless since it’s easy to take in lots of money and still be in the red.
Secondly, a competitor to Facebook does not need to have facebook’s profitability in order for it to be a viable business model.
By your analysis we can look Twitter and gry get the amount of money that people would have to pay to Mastadon in order for Mastadon to be a competitor. Except that the analogy breaks down because because the underlying technology is different. I won’t be paying server fees to “Mastadon” I’d be paying to an instance.
Likewise, wow google drive for sending large files to people needs a lot of servers. Or, we set something up torrent style and then there is no separate server.