It was  reported late last week that Facebook made an estimated $800 million in  revenue last year.  While this might seem like a lot of money for a  social network, especially one that doesn’t charge users a fee, you need  to look a little bit deeper.  If you look closer at the numbers,  Facebook is actually not doing that well in regards to a CPM rate.

Using a variety of web site data  sources (Alexa.com, Facebook.com, etc.), here are some figures  (estimates) that put Facebook’s revenue into context:ads they can serve up, hence, the more money they can make per pageview.

Yearly Revenue: $800 million

Average Monthly Revenue: $67 million

Average Daily Revenue: $2.3 million

Average Number of Unique Visitors a day: 200 million

Average Number of Pageviews a day: 2.6 billion

Revenue Generated Per Pageview: $0.88 CPM

So in a nutshell (and again, these are only rough estimates), this number tells us that Facebook has to serve up about 1,000 pages to make $0.88.  This is why a site like Facebook wants to encourage users to stay on longer and view more pages (and have data be open as opposed to private). 

The more pages you view, the more ads they can serve up, hence, the more money they can make per pageview.

This post was written by Robert Stanke and originally published on robertstanke.com.