How come free websites like facebook are worth billion dollars?

[Stabbers]

Is it just through advertising?
but i hardly see any.....
In the television industry, the subscribers pay the DTH companies who in turn pay the distributors and finally the channels get paid.
Is it the same here? Suppose i use facebook for 1 hour, then will facebook be paid for us using it for an hour? If not, then how do they wrap in such huge profits?

[Charleston Wong]

Money through games apps ads and other companies for ex like Toyota investing to advertise on the sire

[Sarah]

advertising. eeeveryone wants to put an add on the sites because so many people will see them

[Piggiepants]

They collect aggregate marketing information from their users which they sell to advertisers and marketers.

[abramsonrl]

Yes! It's all about advertising.

Not only do you hardly see any ads, you hardly click on any. You might only click once per ten thousand views. Some people will never click on those ads ever. But that one idle click might be worth a dollar or more to an advertiser.

Facebook's value is measured against what its adversing space is expected to be worth over the next five or ten years.

Mindshare is always valuable. Modern people are subjected to up to 30,000 advertising messages per day. They don't count or notice all of them consciously. You might notice the swoop on your friend's shoe out of the corner of your eye or the word `Juicy' on printed the most valuable piece of advertising real estate imaginable.

Advertisers are fighting tooth and nail for any chance to gain a share of your attention. Facebook is only valuable because 500 million people pay attention to it for around 32 minutes a day. If Facebook is valued at $50 billion dollars because to an advertiser, your future stream of undivided daily attention (around 32 minutes per day) is worth an average of $100.

So through a little math magic of my own... That means a tiny piece of your screen is worth an average of about 5 cents per hour. All those little nickles adds up to 50 billion dollars over time.

You would also have to pay Facebook at least ten dollars per year to get rid of those ads off your screen. That's about what Yahoo! Mail charges me to take the ads off the bottom of the emails I send out.

Advertising is getting much more expensive and less affective over time. Newspapers are going out of business. There are so many television channels, different kinds of radio.

An advertiser's audience is more fickle, wary, cautious, and more skeptical then ever. Advertisers are hoping to catch you in a good mood so you will try something new. Or they try to catch you in a bad mood so you'll spend more money.

You're more likely to try something new when you're happy. You're more likely to spend more or eat more when you're sad.

Who can create mood swings like this better than your friends? The fact that your friends are frequently and unexpectedly becoming single, married, or "in a relationship" is causing intense mood swings and social addiction that advertisers are hoping to take advantage of, especially late at night or on Sunday morning when you struck out at the nightclub.

That dating service you always see on facebook suddenly starts to look like a good option. So you click. The dating service pays for your invisible "subscription price."

The spending decisions you make over the next ten years is more likely to be influence by facebook-based influence than any other single source. Remember, facebook alerts show up on your phone screen, too. Facebook follows you because you want to be in touch with your friends and interests. Facebook piggybacks on that.

It's addictive, pervasive, and effective. Its growth is viral and exponential. It's the most profound phenomenon on the internet. Don't believe me? Type "myspace, facebook, twitter, google" into a google trends search. Or just click on the link below.

With new, convenient, high-quality Facebook Video, it's even poised to eventually become the new YouTube.

You will be making significant buying decisions over the next ten years. The future insurance, clothing, and food you choose can be heavily influenced over time by persistent Facebook advertisers. Facebook is used by the young, the influential, and the affluent. Facebook will direct the way you spend your money over the long term.

To savvy advertisers, it's a well-known fact that Facebook is rapidly becoming more influential and important than Google.

So not only is Facebook currently more influential than Google, Facebook may be the single most important technology of the last decade.

A typical Sunday newspaper could cost $8 to print. Your price is about $2. The advertisers pay the rest. Why? Because on average, that single Sunday newspaper directs about $6 worth of your spending.

[pank]

all free websites get paid by the advertisers for every click. People came across a thousands of advertisements each day. but they remember only one or two of them. The advertisers made people to remember the advertisement so that at the time of purchase they remember their brand. so advertisers get benefited by the the web advertisement and advertisers pay them for that. its a give and take relationship.