Facebook worth US$50 billion?!?
05-Jan-11 00:18
Another round of funding has put Facebook's valuation at around US$50 billion (yes, that's billion with a "b").
This is what you get for being such a popular site. Although not a search engine, it almost rivals the reach of Yahoo! and Google. No mean feat:
Is this a good deal for Goldman Sachs and a wealthy Russian investor which invested some US$500 million into the company? Apparently so.
“For Goldman, this is a great strategic play because not only do they have the possibility to be at the front of the line when Facebook eventually IPOs – which many believe to be in 2012 – but they also have this great branding of having these assets and attracting new investors,” Evelyn Rusli, one of the New York Times reporters who broke the story, told CNN.
This is how big Facebook is:
The company says it has more than 500 million users, and more than
three-quarters of them are overseas. It is growing like Topsy. More than
half of users log on every day. In total, Facebookers waste — er,
“spend” — 700 billion minutes on this website every month. That’s 23-1/2
hours per user. No kidding. That’s roughly the equivalent of a full day
each month, or three eight-hour workdays, every month. According to
comScore Inc., people worldwide now spend more time on Facebook each
month than they do on all of Google’s sites.
At US$50 billion, Facebook now outranks the following companies:
* News Corp., which owns the MySpace social network that was once the Facebook of its day: $40 billion
* Bethesda-based defense contractor Lockheed Martin: $25 billion
* Seattle-based caffeine purveyor Starbucks: $25 billion
* The Washington Post Co.: $4 billion (Post Co. chairman Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board of directors.)
* AOL, which lost all hope of being the Internet's most popular site years ago: $3 billion
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