But are social networks unprofitable? My humble income count
I do not pretend to any truth, just want to share my thoughts.
Very often I hear that all social networks are unprofitable and do not bring any income to their owners. At best, the owners go to zero, and at worst, at a loss. I mean such networks as VK and classmates. And I hear it very often lately, although for a long time these soc. Networks have a different kind of monetization ranging from advertising to various paid services.
Such statements are absolutely incomprehensible to me - firstly, if this is the case and the network does not bring income to the owners, then what is the point of containing such a network? If you hope that it will begin to generate income, then another question arises - when? Enough time has passed to start generating this income. And if you hope to sell, so who needs a loss-making network that does not generate income with the current monetization scheme? But this is all a saying. Again, my speculation, and perhaps they are not correct.
')
But it is worth reading ...
In fact, I wanted to “climb” in my pocket and try to calculate the network’s arrivals / losses. Take vKontakte and try to calculate the income from advertising only. The site has some statistics. Unfortunately on liveinternet.ru - detailed statistics were covered, but we can rely on the statements of Mr. Durov himself , Alex's pageview rating so that somehow we calculate some minimum. So we have ~ 1 000 000 000 page views per day (very roughly rounded down, in fact, judging by Alex and the statement of the head of the contact, there are much more). From this page it is clear that the advertisement is placed through the company Media Plus. Tariffs are here . This means that approximately 30% of the income goes to this company. For 1000 hits, they ask for 48 rubles. It is approximately 1.3 USD. Also, according to the most conservative estimates, suppose that advertising is shown only in 70% of the total volume of page impressions (there is not always advertising, someone has banner cutters, etc.). We also take into account the average discount for 20% for advertising. And the average mark-up for targeting is also 20% (usually they do not mutually liquidate themselves). Like all the data collected - you can count:
1 000 000 000/1000 * 1.3 USD = 1 300 000 USD / day. (in an ideal scenario, it would be so ... sour)
Now add and subtract all our interest:
70% of 1 000 000 000 is 700 million hits.
Recalculate the total amount:
700,000,000 / 1000 * 1.3 = 910,000 USD / day. (you can still live :))
910,000 - 30% = 637,000 USD / day. - minus the agency
637,000 + 20% = 764,400 USD / day. - average markup for targeting
764,400 - 20% = 611,520 USD / day. - average volume discount
Total we have a good amount of 611,520 USD / day, and this is only from one! a banner. Suppose that the second banner is shown only in 50% of cases (it is shown to them when they have scrolled the page to the end) we add 50% to this amount and ...
611,520 + 50% = 917,280 USD / day.
This is 917,280 * 30 = 27,518,400 USD / month.
It is said that there are large expenses on the server. Let's count them.
UPD: For example, the entire project takes 2000 servers (based on the achievements of some experts). Let's take not the cheapest ones at 5,000 USD per server (these are pretty good servers!)
I used to count 10 thousand per server, but I was persuaded ...
5,000 * 2,000 = 10,000,000 USD was spent one-time.
I think hosting costs around 40-50 USD per month (with all sorts of discounts, etc.), but for skeptics, we’ll take 150 USD / month.
2000 * 150 = 300,000 USD / month
Salary staff. Honestly - HZ. I once read that they have about a dozen people working. Well, take two dozen on average 3000 USD / month. On chela:
3,000 * 20 = 60,000 USD / month
Taxes: vKontakte is 100% offshore ... let it take 5% for taxes, to be honest, you don’t even want to count :)
Total we have by modest monthly income: 27,518,400 USD
Charges: 60,000 + 300,000 = 360,000 USD
Add here the installation of new servers every month ... Well, for example, another 10 servers is 50,000 USD for hardware. And even if 100 servers out of 27 million can be allocated to new servers ...
In general, this is my arithmetic.
Once again, this is just my guesswork. I have nothing to do with the above networks and to any structures :)
Who has any thoughts on this subject - I ask in comments.
Very often I hear that all social networks are unprofitable and do not bring any income to their owners. At best, the owners go to zero, and at worst, at a loss. I mean such networks as VK and classmates. And I hear it very often lately, although for a long time these soc. Networks have a different kind of monetization ranging from advertising to various paid services.
Such statements are absolutely incomprehensible to me - firstly, if this is the case and the network does not bring income to the owners, then what is the point of containing such a network? If you hope that it will begin to generate income, then another question arises - when? Enough time has passed to start generating this income. And if you hope to sell, so who needs a loss-making network that does not generate income with the current monetization scheme? But this is all a saying. Again, my speculation, and perhaps they are not correct.
')
But it is worth reading ...
In fact, I wanted to “climb” in my pocket and try to calculate the network’s arrivals / losses. Take vKontakte and try to calculate the income from advertising only. The site has some statistics. Unfortunately on liveinternet.ru - detailed statistics were covered, but we can rely on the statements of Mr. Durov himself , Alex's pageview rating so that somehow we calculate some minimum. So we have ~ 1 000 000 000 page views per day (very roughly rounded down, in fact, judging by Alex and the statement of the head of the contact, there are much more). From this page it is clear that the advertisement is placed through the company Media Plus. Tariffs are here . This means that approximately 30% of the income goes to this company. For 1000 hits, they ask for 48 rubles. It is approximately 1.3 USD. Also, according to the most conservative estimates, suppose that advertising is shown only in 70% of the total volume of page impressions (there is not always advertising, someone has banner cutters, etc.). We also take into account the average discount for 20% for advertising. And the average mark-up for targeting is also 20% (usually they do not mutually liquidate themselves). Like all the data collected - you can count:
1 000 000 000/1000 * 1.3 USD = 1 300 000 USD / day. (in an ideal scenario, it would be so ... sour)
Now add and subtract all our interest:
70% of 1 000 000 000 is 700 million hits.
Recalculate the total amount:
700,000,000 / 1000 * 1.3 = 910,000 USD / day. (you can still live :))
910,000 - 30% = 637,000 USD / day. - minus the agency
637,000 + 20% = 764,400 USD / day. - average markup for targeting
764,400 - 20% = 611,520 USD / day. - average volume discount
Total we have a good amount of 611,520 USD / day, and this is only from one! a banner. Suppose that the second banner is shown only in 50% of cases (it is shown to them when they have scrolled the page to the end) we add 50% to this amount and ...
611,520 + 50% = 917,280 USD / day.
This is 917,280 * 30 = 27,518,400 USD / month.
It is said that there are large expenses on the server. Let's count them.
UPD: For example, the entire project takes 2000 servers (based on the achievements of some experts). Let's take not the cheapest ones at 5,000 USD per server (these are pretty good servers!)
I used to count 10 thousand per server, but I was persuaded ...
5,000 * 2,000 = 10,000,000 USD was spent one-time.
I think hosting costs around 40-50 USD per month (with all sorts of discounts, etc.), but for skeptics, we’ll take 150 USD / month.
2000 * 150 = 300,000 USD / month
Salary staff. Honestly - HZ. I once read that they have about a dozen people working. Well, take two dozen on average 3000 USD / month. On chela:
3,000 * 20 = 60,000 USD / month
Taxes: vKontakte is 100% offshore ... let it take 5% for taxes, to be honest, you don’t even want to count :)
Total we have by modest monthly income: 27,518,400 USD
Charges: 60,000 + 300,000 = 360,000 USD
Add here the installation of new servers every month ... Well, for example, another 10 servers is 50,000 USD for hardware. And even if 100 servers out of 27 million can be allocated to new servers ...
In general, this is my arithmetic.
Once again, this is just my guesswork. I have nothing to do with the above networks and to any structures :)
Who has any thoughts on this subject - I ask in comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/52831/
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