Is facebook really worth $50 billion?

[paulson]

The breaking news was reported by Top newspapers all around the world in the beginning of NewYear that Facebook has raised $500 million from Goldman sachs and another russian investor and the transaction values the company at $ 50 billion. The news raised eyebrows of many financial experts, and triggered debates whether facebook was really worth $50 billion.

Source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/...ion-valuation/

and recently mashable reported that, facebook has successfully raised another $1 billion and the investment came from some overseas investors thorough Goldman sachs. So a total of $ 1.5 billion.

Source: http://mashable.com/2011/01/21/faceb...th-50-billion/

This was really a good start for facebook as it planning for IPO in 2012, this was a good sign of investors' appetite for facebook's shares.

But, is Facebook really worth $ 50 billion? yes say many financial experts.

Facebook is growing faster than Google and yahoo. (wallstreet Journal)

Facebook was the most visited site last year, overtakes Google.

Facebook's ad revenue was around $2 billion last year and is expected to increase to around $ 6 billion by 2012 .

Still, is facebook really worth $50 billion? the debate continues... and will continue till the social network giant enters stock market with a bang! [/LIST]

[williamc]

It is worth whatever someone will pay for it.

[markbu]

It is worth whatever someone will pay for it.

That doesn't actually prove it's worth. That just proves somebody is willing to hand over somebody else's cash. Facebook isn't the cash cow the hype would have you believe, if it was, why sell chunks of it for short term cash investments?

Don't be surprised if there's another large investment shortly before facebook floats proper just to give it an even higher artificial "worth".

[blogger234]

It's not that much worth seems to me, but maybe to someone...People sometimes buy the strangest things...

[claybutler]

Worth is illusionary for anything that isn't directly related to sustaining life. So food and water have value. Same with fuel and raw materials. Everything else is subjective. Facebook is worth nothing and everything simultaneously since it's value is intangable and transitory by nature. So as William said "it's worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it." Meaning it could be worth 50 billion today and 50 million tomorrow and the next day it could be zero (though that's nearly an impossibility)

[Hiphopmusic]

Good responses everyone. In my opinion, I would think of it as a stock or equity in the marketplace. I would analyze it like any other company and speculate the growth in the next year, 5 yrs, and 10 yrs. The only problem is that's hard to do since the social marketplace is fairly new on such a mainstream level.

[izapharry]

I think face is more costly then $ 50 billion , you the popularity for face book ?

[martindow]

Don't these valuations remind you of the dot com bubble madness? I would have thought that Facebook is very vulnerable to whims of fashion and that its users could well disappear or lose interest as quickly as they arrived. Needless to say I am not going to invest my savings in Facebook if the opportunity arises.

[markbu]

The people valuing it at $50bn are basing that on a $ return down the line. The theory is as more and more people and data is added it becomes unrealistic for another company to get a slice.

Why would you join a minority social network when all your friends are on facebook? The thing is, from a business point of view facebooks isn't a social service, it's there purely to harvest data to target advertising.

Potentially a monopoly unlike any we've ever seen.

Eventually Governments will have to intervene. The question is now if, but when.

[techmeaux]

Never listen to financial forecasters without knowing where they come from e-psychologically. The world has indeed changed, and actually more in concept, than in reality, the change you see is a tremor, a tip of the iceberg, and the industrial world, all hands on deck paddling away, is the Titanic, who has just torn belly on the next. But just the topical effects this ever emergent technological disruption has created, undetectable to the majority, except for the obvious systemic corrosion, is NOW being noticed - everything you see today, and will see, is related to this underlying, "new" current.

What does that mean? Example - When Soviet Russia, hoped for the panacea of a cyclical adjustment as they began cracking, what they failed to realize was the structural, irreversible change that tore them in pieces, once again. What was it? Look as you may, in 4 inch thick books, written by political scientists, and you will find nothing but a bunch of hot wind, the kind the put students to sleep with in universities across the country still. But James Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg*, Alvin Toffler, and other spelled it out in a page or two. The thing that tore the USSR apart, was the decentralizing, micro sizing power of the micro chip. It forever changed the scale of things they designed enormously, and in place, to much smaller, higher power, distributed entities. Those entities where in every form which applied, or could be affected by this invisible revolution. Those books? You didn't even find the subject hinted at, because like financial forecasters, and political scientists, who do not grasp the concept, it is quite foreign, oblique, and verging on conspiracy to them, it went right over their heads. This stuff was not broadcast on cable, tv or radio, yet... HERE it is.. To Bill Gates? It's a reality he spoke with John Walker, the AutoCAD developer, for a paper he never finished, World War IV, which basically spelled out the conceptual math which would create nation-state extinction, while the nation-state authorities, governments, academics, experts and others waffled in industrial ignorance, not only not seeing it coming, not understanding it while the walls tumbled around them symbolically.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www...on2_106_1.html

"ever since the idea popped into my head during a conversation with Bill Gates"

So what does this have to do with Facebook?
Nothing, unless you see from the e-distant past, of 1997, what a Facebook is, it's a nation within a world wide... web. The implications are enormous, commensurate with the population of that nation. Even if it only has half the draw it claims, it's as big or bigger then some COUNTRIES. And people aren't going there to search a Madonna Extant Cheesecake Recipe, they are staying there. This core concept and technological framework can be replicated, it can be a chamaeleon, and who knows what else - it's deeper than it looks. A financial forecaster, just according to the general bell curve these huge technological revolutions have thrown them on, are in an inertia in general of lack of knowledge, denial, and antique models, in majority, you really had to be an expert or near expert at a number of sciences, to know what Bill Gates and others knew years ago, which they talked about, which they wrote about, which an uncommon few pick up on, which MOST of your governments, institutions, businesses, and the like, STILL consider fantasy, although daily the world is being swallowed by it.

What is it? It's the theoretical power, of not just the micro-chip now, but turning data, into information, ALSO into a sort of wisdom or truth (analytical power, and strategic development guided by that implication), for specific purposes. The purpose, as built in any MARket, a trade/finance war zone, is competition. What it enables, is not being 10% faster and more powerful than another competitive entity, but being 10 and 20,000% faster, efficient, flexible, devouring, and "better". Better by the rules established by the industrial corporate finance complex, which if they run old industrial DNA, are just as susceptible to this new e-Predatory DNA. What I mean is, Facebook is just one example, you have entities, in all kinds of forms, running on the "secret" knowledge and know-how, to replace not one competitor, but tens and hundreds and even thousands of them, in a very short time period, because this "new" paradigm, uses itself, speed-of-light-computing, to improve, replicate and distribute itself, it's little footprints are all around us, and it's little walk, is shaking the earth.

I, like others out there, do not know how the world is going to handle the antiquation of the many (institutional, business, government, etc), in their own time, if we only use it to consume each other. If we used it, aside from the ego and pride, and competitive, predatory nature of the mars-ket game, we actually could have a world with everything, for everybody. I believe the power center brontosaur, that is currently being taken apart one velociraptor bite at a time, will instead of working with it, will resist it's new master, and in that desperation, confusion and chaos, it could all be ruined very fast. Like them, if people doubt it, it's not because the information is not there, it's because they spend x amount of time looking at something, and y amount of time is required studying something new, and yet now, the concepts are old in digital terms. The next waves, will change a world even more, replace the operating concept in a similar way that industrial technologies changed the operating concept of agricultural government. This next potential unity, will more than likely become a "civil" war of all vs. all, in techno blinded confusion. In the meantime, we can move to Facebook, LOL.

http://www.dailyreckoning.co.uk/colu...rees-mogg.html
**THE GREAT RECKONING: by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg
THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL: by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg
http://www.isil.org/resources/libert...dual-book.html