• Reuters, Tuesday, July 7, 2009 12:51 PM

Facebook will be making billions of dollars in revenue in just five years, Facebook board member and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen tells Reuters. He adds that the social network could top $1 billion in revenue this year if it pushed harder on selling advertising, but that it was more important for the company at this stage to grow its user base and market share, rather than worrying too much about making lots of money.

"This calendar year they'll do over $500 million," Andreessen said in an interview. "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."

Though a board member, Andreessen is not a Facebook investor, which is something he regrets. He has, however, invested in Twitter, the fast-growing micro-blogging site that lets users share 140-character messages known as tweets but has yet to make any money. He and Ben Horowitz, his partner in the new venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, note that Twitter's growth strategy is the same as Facebook's. "They have to take the market," says Horowitz. "There is no investor in Twitter who will tell you: 'Boy, those guys are screwing up, there's no revenue yet.'"

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