Marc Andreessen, a Facebook board member, has said that the social networking site is set to earn in excess of $500m (£309m) this year and will likely be posting billions of dollars in revenue in five years. Andreessen, speaking to Reuters, said that Facebook would earn more than a billion this year if it was to push harder on selling advertising. But he said that it was more important for Facebook to retain and grow its user base at this point.
He told Reuters: "This calendar year they'll do over $500m. If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year.
"There's every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now."
Andreessen, who founded Netscape and has just launched a venture capital fund with another former Netscape executive Ben Horowitz, said it was a mistake for Facebook shareholders to be selling their stock now.
Facebook is permitting some shareholders to sell their shares to Digital Sky, the Russian firm that invested $200m in the social networking site in May, because its initial public offering is at least a few years away.
Andreessen told Reuters that although micro blogging site Twitter was not making any money at present, it was important for it to grow its user base and market share, just like Facebook.
He said MySpace focussed too much on selling ads and not enough on developing its platform, which has led to the social networking site losing market share.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andreessen joined the Facebook board last July.
He is also former chief technical officer at AOL and was one of those behind the development of Mosaic, which was the first major web browser that for a while rivalled Internet Explorer.
Andreessen is also an investor in Digg, Netvibes and Twitter.
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