I'm Jon Olick. I make shiny things. I simplify.


I presented Sparse Voxel Octrees at Siggraph 2008.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Facebook is worth 50 billion

You've got to be kidding me. This is obviously just investor valuation overload. Goldman paid 450 million for less than 1% of Facebook. Really....

So facebook has 500 million users. That means each user is valued at $100. And thats assuming that each user is an active user, which is not the case. The real valuation may be more like $250 - $500 per active user. That just doesn't make sense to me. Their primary revenue source is advertising. You get about $1 for every 1000 views in non-search advertising. If somebody visits their Facebook page once every day, then each user is worth $0.365 per year. To recoup the best case of $100 per user, that would take 300 years or so. As in, impossible. I don't know what those investors are smoking, but it must be Zuckerberg's !@#$.

In other news, Apple is worth more than Google. Seriously, and not by a trivial amount either.

Something is wrong with the world.

2 comments:

  1. This is why facebook doesn't publish it financials. Also, the share price indicates the perceived value of the company (ie: its future potential), not just its current income. Finally, the value of anything is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. Considering what myspace sold for, facebook could be worth a lot (close to $50 billion!)

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  2. Yeah, good point. Its typically 10x to 20x their EBITDA. (Typically closer to the 10x) That would imply they made somewhere between 2.5 and 5 billion in 2010. Craziness.

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