Facebook On The Block

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.'"

Comments

Why?

[djdanlib]

Why do the Facebook people feel the need to sell their company? Come on, just keep running Facebook the way it is. It doesn't need to be sold.

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?

[eln]

Why do they need to sell it? Because if they do they can retire to their own private island instead of managing a cheesy yet inexplicably hugely popular website?

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?

[BewireNomali]

I think why facebook s interesting is because it's self renewing. The difference with other social sites is that they quickly die the death most fads do.

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.

[vertinox]

You know... I've seriously thought about this myself. I just have to figure out how to make a site that generates a lot of hits with no real income and then sell it off to the highest bidder.

go ahead, inflate that bubble again

[Lazy Jones]

with such insane amounts of money pouring into overhyped dotcoms again, I can see the next crash coming... show me the myspace.com business model please - I mean, I'm all for sites driven by user-generated content (it works for slashdot and many others), but such large investments should have at least a tiny chance of being made back eventually (i.e. in the next 10 years or so) ;-)

frighteningly familiar...

[drew]

Anyone here remember PointCast? What, never heard of them?

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.

Re:oh brother

[jcnnghm]

You obviously aren't in college. Facebook is a marketers wet dream. One of the hardest demographics to reach hits that site literally 20 times a day. And that includes everyone, especially the trend setting popular kids (who are often the most addicted).