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Facebook On The Block
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:56 AM
from the folks-on-the-service-already-selling-themselves dept.
from the folks-on-the-service-already-selling-themselves dept.
conq writes "BusinessWeek reports that Facebook has turned down an offer for $750 million and is looking for 2 billion dollars. The article speculates that one possible suitor would be Viacom. From the article: 'A Facebook deal would help Viacom founder and Executive Chairman Sumner Redstone fend off a growing challenge from News Corp. The media conglomerate run by Rupert Murdoch has poured enormous resources into the Internet during the last year. It acquired social-networking pioneer MySpace.com last year for $580 million.'"
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oh brother (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:oh brother (Score:5, Insightful)
Drunk idiots (Score:4, Funny)
Most investors can't register (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.travsite.com/)
I'm not sure how long that will last (Score:5, Informative)
Some suggest that Facebook is somehow more safe for its participants. A surface examination may suggest that, but I think on a practical level it's not. As the security fears of Myspace die down (they're really just the normal internet dating fears that we've always heard except now brought down to 14 year olds plus the current hysteria regarding sexual offenders) I think that Facebook's closedness will be looked upon as a disadvantage.
After all, if you're going to spend $2 billion on Facebook, you'd want a pretty strong potential for growth, and Facebook will get maxed out too quickly, and the only new growth for it will be from new high schoolers who can add themselves in. The brand has to open up to create the value.
(I add, incidentally, that I've thought about this because Facebook, as it was originally designed, was a reasonable concept for a small college like Harvard. I go to Ohio State, where the idea of having so much information about you (until recently the default) presented to what is a mega-city sized student/alumni population is assinine. Though I've got a facebook account, I find the obscurity of myspace more convenient (though I don't post salacious pictures of myself doing stupid things that employers could discover later.)
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember what happened when they sold mp3.com? It died a horrible death. If that happens to Facebook... a lot more people will be upset.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Thursday May 24, @01:08AM)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is a cheesy unoriginal idea that became a huge fad, and these guys can reap a huge financial windfall for it. They would be fools not to sell.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook is constantly renewing itself - with a new "class" as students leave and students come in.
So in my estimation, facebook is more valuable than Myspace because facebook has constant and consistent and probably measurable influx of new people. If they can permanently tie facebook to the college experience, then facebook becomes a very valuable long term commodity, because advertisers and content providers can target the entire college age audience at once. That would be huge.
also, from a financial standpoint, college students are even more valuable than high school students, as they all will be wielding credit cards for the first time, meaning they've just acquired their power to spend beyond their means. All my college friends incurred serious debt in college - in fact most of their debt was acquired in school. So advertising to this "new money" as it were, is very important.
The new business model. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://mp3bat.com/)
The internet bubble is back in force! (Score:5, Interesting)
Add to Friends (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.efinke.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 29 2006, @03:30PM)
Hmmm...
/ Adds Mark Zuckerberg to his friends.
2 billion? (Score:1)
go ahead, inflate that bubble again (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://pobox.com/~mjy | Last Journal: Thursday August 02, @02:40PM)
I still find it interesting... (Score:2)
I e-mailed them once, since I administer an Internet filter in an educational environment, asking them if they would allow an option for high school staff to create an account just like they did with college faculty/staff. I've never received a reply.
How the negotiations went down (Score:5, Funny)
Great. So the future of business looks like this:
sumredrok: yo
facebk: yo!
sumredrok: asm?
facebk: 2/lots/watugot?
sumredrok: 750m?
facebk: up urs n00b
sumredrok: wtf?
facebk: 2b
foxyrupert: pwn3d!
"Capital, capital, everywhere, and no VCs who think."
Dot com boom days? (Score:2)
(http://www.mcgill.ca/)
What kind of wealth does it generate?
What kind of assets does it have?
I'd take the money and run (Score:2)
(http://www.networkmirror.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 05, @04:34PM)
advertising? (Score:1)
(http://www.celardore.net/)
Never heard of it (Score:1)
Re:Never heard of it (Score:4, Informative)
http://facebook.com/ [facebook.com]
Dotcom is back baby! (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 30 2002, @03:29AM)
Social Networking Backlash (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.bryantchoung.com/)
the value isn't in the tech... (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with their thinking (Score:4, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Saturday October 28 2006, @04:11AM)
And in other social networking site sales news... (Score:3, Funny)
(http://infaux.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 01 2005, @02:08PM)
Google will pay someone to take Orkut off their hands, in Brazilian currency too!
frighteningly familiar... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.drewandkim.com/)
They were going to be the next big thing 10 years ago. If I remember correctly, they were offered something $500 million for their company and turned it down. They said they would be 10 times that amount in a few years. Well, a few years came and went, and suddenly they were worth less than a tenth of that amount.
Way to go, idiots. Newsflash: You're riding on a fad. Sell out when the fad is hot, because when it's gone you'll have nothing.
Oh well, their loss.
facebook is big (Score:2, Informative)
$2 billion might be too much, but it's definitely a worthy investment if you're a gigantic media company. yea it might be cheaper to create your own, but you can't just create that kind of popularity..
Irrational exuberance has returned (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday November 09, @01:18PM)
Apparently in 7 years peoples memories have fallen by the wayside.
Turned down $750m? (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Saturday January 15 2005, @10:40PM)
2 billion for a few months of ad space (Score:2)
(http://www.devinmoore.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 24, @06:16AM)
why did friendster not succeed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, Facebook has a simply defined social network- the school. On Friendster you have to build your own.
Third is the luck of fads and momentum. Kids are notorious for following fads. Facebook was in the right place at the right time.
Why facebook is better than myspace (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.tanwhore.com/)
1. All facebook profiles are uniform. They are the same color and can only have one profile picture. This makes everything so much easier on the eyes. The pages load quicker and relevant information is easy to acquire. There aren't a million pictures, animated gifs, songs, videos all over the page.
2. The majority of ads are text. Most of the ads are google type text ads, and only 1 or 2 ads are shown at a time. And here's the best part: The ads are usually bought by a student or local business. So instead of seeing huge flash ads for some shitty movie or band, you see relevant ads about a local bar special or someone who has a sub-lease available in their apartment.
3. You have to be in College (or now high school) to join. Facebook requires you to have a college e-mail adddress to join. While I'm not saying every college student is perfect and a big winner in society, you have to face the fact that most people that are on myspace are huge losers. I'm talking about all of the people who work the dead-end minimum wage jobs, do drugs every night, just take webcam pictures of themselves, and are going nowhere in life. There is none of that on facebook.
4. Information is not readily available to anyone who wants it. To view someone's profile you have to go to the same school as them. If you don't go to the same school you can still see that they have a profile, but you have to be added as their friend before you can actually see the profile. This greatly cuts down on all of the stalkers out there.
5. Facebook is a legitmate communication tool. Many professors have embraced the technology and joined facebook. Even my college president (at the u of Iowa) is on it. I know many friends who now send messages to others on facebook instead of e-mail, citing the fact that most students will check their facebook messages more often than their e-mail. Myspace can't be used for communication except for saying things like "thanx 4 the add", "check out my new webcam pix", "damn baby u r so hot"
There are probably even more comparisons I could make but I'm running late for class. Facebook hasn't been around quite as long as myspace, so I'm sure it doesn't have as many subscribers. I'm bettting though as years go and more people go to college the site will become much bigger than myspace. It's just so much cleaner and easier to use.
I think selling facebook would be a huge mistake. The way it stands now, the site is run by a couple of students (or former students, they may have graduated) They've added many features, but have done it subtly. It seems like every time more functionality is added on myspace it just makes the profiles that much uglier. When it happens on facebook, it makes it that much more usable. I'm only afraid that if the wrong company buys the site, they will try to compete with myspace and try to turn facebook into another myspace. Sorry for the rant, but I hope that this post will enlighten some of the people who have just read about these sites but haven't actually been able to join the facebook.
How much are they making in revenue right now? (Score:1)
(http://cndrr.mine.nu/)
And to everyone that's saying Facebook is stupid/pointless/never heard of it... I re-iterate what others have said: if you're in college right now, it -is- important. It's one of the easiest ways to exchange contact information; all you need to do is remember a name and ask, "are you on Facebook?" and bam -- email, address, clubs, phone number, pictures, everything. It's extremely convenient when you meet people in unlikely situations. And I check Facebook usually once a day, and compared to a lot of people at my school, that's not bad at all. So make fun of it all you want... it's a great networking tool and very, VERY popular right now for the 18-25 crowd.
why? (Score:1)
(http://www.shoutcentral.com/)
playing catch up (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://na641.deviantart.com/)
trust me... as soon as facebook becames 'corporate' people will flee from it.
Facebook... (Score:1)
$2 Billion == Not for sale (Score:1)
My understanding is that they were offered $750 million not that they were looking for a buyer. That makes a huge difference.
agreed (Score:1)
Money. (Score:2)
(http://www.bigzaphod.org/)
FaceBook (Score:1)
(http://www.chasepaymentech.com/)
For people that actually use those sites to create a network of associates, it's great business. I've made a number of contacts that have benefited by greatly.
2 billion is about right (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.joshuaheffner.com/)
PointCast called, they said to take the money (Score:2)
(http://www.mccrew.com/)
This sounds very similar to a situation with old PointCast, one of the early purveyors of "push" content. They had a similar hubris. Let's see if Facebook ends up in the same pile with PointCast.
"PointCast turned into a case study for how not to run a business. In 1997, when push fever was at its peak, the company turned down a $450 million buyout offer from Rupert Murdoch. It subsequently tried to go public, but by that time push had gone sour, and the IPO had to be pulled at the last minute. Finally PointCast was sold last May for a paltry $7 million to LaunchPad Technologies, one of the companies that came out of Bill Gross' Idealab." [forbes.com]
Ads will kill it (Score:2)
Thats why facebook has emerged victorious (somewhat), because its solid and clean, and only other students can look at your profile (aka fairly secure). Pump it full of annoying ads and stuff, and the facebook crowd will find somewhere else. Pump Google's homepage full of blinking flashing ads and watch another 'clean' search engine pop up and take marketshare...
Net Fads are like Cell Division (Score:1)
(http://xenu.net/)
As most Slashdotters know, there's always some Next Big Thing happening on the Internet. Nearly all the tech we take for granted was a huge deal when it was new. Think about the Web, scripting languages (dynamic pages), peer-to-peer, instant messaging, blogging, and countless others.
The funny thing is, they all seem to follow the same course. First, there is a precursor, be it a similar technology or a less-successful attempt at something very similar. Then, a huge rise to the point where "everybody" knows about it and is predicting either paradise or apocalypse because of it. After this, it either fades and dies, or splits into many different companies/groups offering the service, or a bunch of splinter technologies. Wash, rinse, repeat.
We're not as gay (Score:1)
What this story is really about (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
What have you done with your life?
What's it worth? (Score:1)
(http://www.sexysprite.com/index.php?r=17 | Last Journal: Wednesday November 30 2005, @10:40PM)
Here's how I would think about the value.
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] the site has
So let's say... 6 million users, $750 mil price - that's paying $125 per user. If you needed a 10% return and assuming it's a stable user base that won't disappear, you'd want to make a profit of $12.50 per user per year. Is that reasonable? I don't think it's unattainable given it's regularly used and the site's demographic.
If they get $2 bil and you need a 15% return, you'd want to make $50 per user per year, or you'd need additional user growth beyond the 6 mil.
Verbs (Score:1)
Re:Caspar Weinberger, dead at 88 (Score:2, Offtopic)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 13 2005, @03:45PM)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12050783/ [msn.com]
But dude, pulling out a clique like that for a deal death is just sick..
Re:Students = Money (Score:1)
(http://www.student-manager.com/)
Re:HAHAHahaahaha! (Score:1)
Re:HAHAHahaahaha! (Score:1)
(http://blog.aventius.net/)
2 billion dollars ?? !!! Hahaha . LOL. (Score:2)
Advice - SELL and get out . Nothing unique about the website.
The Facebook boys got caught stealing source code from ConnectU.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_(website) [wikipedia.org]