Shoutbox

can anyone explain, or sensibly try at least, why facebook is reportedly worth so much money ? 15 billion been floated around quite abit in the news

Maybe because half the internet uses it?

^ Random statistic, yeah. But you get the point.

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Originally posted by Chrono
Maybe because half the internet uses it?

^ Random statistic, yeah. But you get the point.

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still, its something that is free, its easily replaced, it seems to offers little reward to the owner.

yes you can do some advertising on there, but some been the key, do to much and people are likely to go else where, apart from that I'm struggling to see the benefits to someone trying to make money.

because it is so widely used the ads on the side get lots of hits

I've never understood that sort of thing either

Plus, they make over $1 million USD anually on their "$1 USD" Gifts which are basically just pictures you pay for to appear in others profiles.  How lame is that, you pay for a picture to appear somewhere...

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Originally posted by Jarrod
because it is so widely used the ads on the side get lots of hits

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widely used or not, can't see the limit advertising worth 15billion

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Originally posted by Dane
Plus, they make over $1 million USD anually on their "$1 USD" Gifts which are basically just pictures you pay for to appear in others profiles.  How lame is that, you pay for a picture to appear somewhere...

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didn't know there where doing that, either way million turn over (granted with adverts i'm guessing the real turn over it quite a bit more) still can't see how it can be valued so high. it doesn't have an USP, nor really does it actually have anything to sell.

how i'm seeing it at the minute (but hoping someone can shed more light on it). facebook is like an empty building that has little use but lots of people are currently standing in. these people are free to come and go, and most won't like change, and is all probability most of these people will move onto a different building soon anyway

so why on earth would anyone buy the building ?

Because it has a huge userbase, and it means they can introduce more profit making schemes. Such as advertising, and shops, and they are introducing a new thing for the plugins (or whatever you call them) where you can pay for them to be analysed and get a "certificate". I think it was like $50 per script.

There's also a huge chain reaction, because plenty of business's want it, so they auction, and the price gets higher and higher, if you see what I mean...

It also has a huge potential for everything else to be honest.

More than 130 millions users information (atleast Name & Email) are pretty much, aren't they? You could send them a advertising broadcast and easily make that money back!

As Nathan says, there is a lot of potential. Creativity (for making money out of a website) has no limits.

Active userbase is valued higher than technology... Twitter, Digg, Youtube... all those are free, easy to replace and for from exciting technology, but they are worth billions when you figure out how to monetize them properly. Everyone could build a twitter/digg/youtube clone, but you can't clone a userbase.

Having that said, they numbers these companies are potentially worth don't mean anything when they don't sell... So far Twitter is just a site making no money at all having huge scalability problems and they might just die out owing money to their investors because they have no clue how to turn their userbase into dollars.

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Originally posted by toddy
nor really does it actually have anything to sell.

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Neither does Google

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Originally posted by Felu
More than 130 millions users information (atleast Name & Email) are pretty much, aren't they? You could send them a advertising broadcast and easily make that money back!

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Nah,with the extremely low rate people respond to spam you wont get your money back that way. Besides, the real big spammers send out way more emails than that daily and they just have to pay some kid for that to write a vrirus and create a huge botnet