A big part of buying behavior for phones is the carrier retail outlets pushing the phones onto potential buyers.
Facebook, like Amazon, is a company deriving revenue from its ads and content (virtual currency, etc). They could afford to sell the phones to carriers "at cost", at which point the carriers will have a HUGE incentive to sell the phones. Now of course, if they sell at 0 margin to the carriers, HTC won't be happy. But HTC is not doing well at all in terms of phone sales, and perhaps they'd be willing to sell the phone to carriers at very low margins (kind of like how LG, lagging in sales and design inspiration, partnered up with Google and sold a device, the Nexus 4, for very very cheap).
In such a case, FB phones could actually sell a decent amount.
Facebook, like Amazon, is a company deriving revenue from its ads and content (virtual currency, etc). They could afford to sell the phones to carriers "at cost", at which point the carriers will have a HUGE incentive to sell the phones. Now of course, if they sell at 0 margin to the carriers, HTC won't be happy. But HTC is not doing well at all in terms of phone sales, and perhaps they'd be willing to sell the phone to carriers at very low margins (kind of like how LG, lagging in sales and design inspiration, partnered up with Google and sold a device, the Nexus 4, for very very cheap).
In such a case, FB phones could actually sell a decent amount.