Since I am a guy, I will probably never understand publishing on Facebook, but half the population is women. They spend money, and are influenced by a wide range of factors of which I am mostly clueless. Serious data mining may be more of a fear than a current reality, but as a landlord, I have found social networking to be extremely valuable for both positive and negative application reviews. Do their daughters talk about the prospective tenant as being a hyper christian neat-freak or a hoarder with a thing for bad-boys. I have been lied to on enough reference calls to know the value of unsolicited information.
I'm not quite sure about that. I had the impression that too many adults on myspace. My space was for kids and they left when mom and dad starting "myspace" pages.
$50 billion value 6,892,400,000 people on earth according to wikipedia $7.25 per person if every single human on the planet signs up. Good luck anyone getting $7 bucks worth out of my data
Could also have been a contributing factor. Facebook is at that stage. I dont believe that they will increase ads though. It will be interesting to see where they get there money from. Some sort of hidden marketing/ads maybe.
Google actually provides valuable services - search being the most important, but lots of other little doo-dads... Facebook is a fad. Fads get old, fast.
Its like art. Its worth whatever you can bullshit somebody to give up. There's an artist who was interviewed on Charlie Rose who embedded a shark in lucite; sold it for some ten's of millions to somebody who expects to sell it for a profit to somebody else who he'll bullshit. I'm in thorough agreement on the notion that Facebook doesn't create a damn thing. Their worth comes from inserting themselves into the aggragate business transaction via advertising thereby causing inflation. Advertising is why the mute button was created. You must have seen television ads lately, half the time I don't even know what they were selling though I recognize the repeated images. Could taxpayers be on the hook on this one when Goldman shorts it?
facebook records 800 million in revenue and only 200 million in net profits now it cost 500 million/year to run this company is the 500 million funny money account revenue. also google revenue...all their money is in irish bank and pays 2.3% corporate tax... how can a corporation so little tax???? i'm not an accountant but how does facebook cost 500 million/year in what. it doesn't advertise... it's just a website. it cost 500 million /year to host a website..??? advertising revenue are intangible and this company doesn't sell anything. other than sell advertising space,,,advertising is the main source of revenue or selling information or marketing..people will never pay to use google or facebook
^^^ $500M pa mostly for the data centers & 60,000 servers, moron. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/14/whos-got-the-most-web-servers/ Do idiots really think these websites pay $1000 pm hosting...? Then again, ET is mostly sad past-it, never-was wackos primarily off the grid conspiracy fruit cakes, hermit, wannabe traders who think everything in the modern world is useless & wasteful..
A lot of people here are using MySpace, Hotmail, Geocities, etc, as examples of where Facebook is headed (ie. just another fad that will burn itself out). What they don't realize is that all of these sites have effectively been eaten up by Facebook. They failed because Facebook succeeded. In the internet economy, the winner takes all, and at the moment the winner is Facebook. Facebook is doing to Hotmail what email did to the fax machine. Google is a $200billion company. In many respects, the data that Facebook collects is of more commercial value than Google's. A relatively small group of consumers will set next season's fashion trends and start the next big fads. (Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point) Facebook has the data to determine exactly who those people are and what they consume. Google data can spot trends once they've started. Facebook data can tell you the next big trend before it's even started. That knowledge is priceless. Another company may come along in the future and do to Facebook what Facebook has done to MySpace, etc. But at this point in time, there is nothing on the horizon.