You're providing a hypothetical conspiracy theory business model, and assuming that FB has a high profit margin. FB's revenues seem to come primarily from ads. No one knows how much money they're actually making from virtual currency.

Take a look at what FB actually offers its users: core services: photo sharing, video sharing, blogging, micro-blogging, instant messaging, event/group management. non-core services (apps): quizzes, casual games, horoscopes.

Sounds like any other company everyone knows (Yahoo)? The difference is that FB offers all this with a single login, and the (perceived) greater privacy offered for things you post online. Yahoo never even managed to implement a single login across all of its sites and acquisitions.

The problem is that just like Yahoo and Myspace, there's nothing stopping Facebook from losing users to other sites. The business model is to have a lot of visits from a lot of users and serving them ads that don't bring in much profit. That's a lot of risk, and the upside isn't that great.

I don't see FB moving to a paid premium model. Even if it did that, it wouldn't be that different from what AOL had 10 years ago.

There's just not that much value in what FB does, and not much from preventing others from taking that value away from them.