Talk about growth, a very rapid one: the social network, Facebook has served more ads on its platform than any other website that exists today. According to the latest report, the social network published a mammoth 176.3 billion banner ads and that is just for the first quarter of 2010. That averages to more than 50 billion per month.

That constitutes to over 16% of the total ads that have been served across the Web. With that share in the ads, Facebook has gone past the existing giants namely Yahoo and Microsoft by almost a factor of two, but sadly Facebook isn't really bagging in the potential of its platform when it comes to generating revenue from it. You can figure that out simply from the fact that Facebook is estimated to be making around $1 Billion in the current year, while would most definitely exceed $5 Billion [given it already made $6.5 Billion in 2009.

The winning point for Facebook is the amount of time each of the user spends on the social network and how exponentially it is growing. Those are the reasons why names like Toyota, Verizon, etc have a lion's share, showing that brands are tilting in favor of spending revenue for promotion across the social network. I personally think generating revenue is not an issue for Facebook given it has all the possibilities to turn those visits, page views and an enormous space to monetize.

[via WSJ]