The latest news on Facebook reports that it is on track to generate $100m in revenue this year. Can this really be true? The site now has nearly 18m registered users and serves 1 billion web pages a day. This works out to an average of $5.55 in revenue per user. Seems pretty reasonable considering the CPM ads that they’re currently delivering. No wonder they didn’t want to sell to Yahoo! The previous $1b over makes it worth only 10x earnings which is pretty low for the Internet space.

Update: Just found some stats from the Facebook Blog:

• We have more than 1 billion photos on the site.
• To keep up with the huge amount of data that needs to be rapidly accessed at any given time, we utilize 2 Terabytes of RAM distributed across many Memcache servers.
• Our fleet of servers are hosted across two co-locations.
• Our search infrastructure fields 600 million searches each month using a 200-gigabyte search index, featuring real time updates.

If you’re into geeky stuff, do check out the new Facebook Query Language (FQL). It’s an impressive language that’s a little like SQL and allows you to easily query Facebook’s data. This is one of the smartest APIs I’ve seen out there. And it is world changing compared to MySpace’s haughty attitude.