Facebook would have to really screw up at this point in order to end up the next Yahoo! They made 1 billion in 2011, while yahoo only made over 1 billion 3 times (max was 1.8 billion in '05, my sources are the yahoo annual reports) since 96. The question isn't whether Facebook can be as big as Yahoo!, that is basically assured. The question is whether they can be the next google (who went from making 400 million when they ipo'd to 9.7 billion today).

Absolute numbers are not a meaningful metric -- much better to compare e.g. each sites percentage of overall traffic, or dollar of revenue per user. There's so much more money being flushed down the internet toilet these days that I would be shocked if Facebook were anywhere near Yahoo!'s numbers from their peak.

I guess we haven't agreed upon what metric we are even trying to compare (not surprising then we have a disagreement). I was making a comment on facebook vs yahoo as a profitable business, so I looked at profit. Facebook may never get to yahoo in terms of $/user (I don't know what yahoo's numbers are like now, or at their peak) but what exactly are you trying to compare such that you think $/user is a worthwhile stat to look at?

You can make the argument that it's a different era now, so looking at total profit isn't an apples to apples comparison, but a counterargument could be that the internet is a much more competitive landscape than it was in, say, 1996 so that it's actually more impressive what facebook has done in this era.