Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
i read garbage like this and think we're headed for yet another intenet fall. myspace? facebook? do we hontestly expect these fads to drive an economy? the web is 21st century snake oil.
Don't go to school, can't register on the Facebook. Bummer.
Life in Orange County
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.
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.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Sure, its' alexa ranking is 62 but $2 billion for a site created two years ago? WOW! You would think a billion worth of investment into engineering and marketing could easily recreate facebook.
That may sound like a huge amount of money, especially when you consider that the company was launched just two years ago by a group of sophomores at Harvard University, led by Mark Zuckerberg
Hmmm...
/ Adds Mark Zuckerberg to his friends.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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."
Facebook features a userbase of millions of sticky eyeballs which can be readily monetized using contextual advertising solutions that transcend the superficial and target the user's behavior.
For example, they use their users' Google tracking cookies to determine which web sites they visit. Facebook can then deliver targeted advertisements that result in a very high clickthrough percentage relative to ordinary bannervertising.
Facebook has also enabled rich media advertising for those who have tired of the traditional text and graphical media. A vibrant, full motion advertisement produces far more revenue and recognition.
For more information, click here.
2 billion dollars? 750 million and they turned it down? This is the very cause for the Social Networking Backlash Techcrunch covered like snubster.com and isolatr.com
The value isn't in the tech... facebook is entrenched. Everyone is on facebook. Is that worth $2 bil? I dunno...
Computers can make otherwise intelligent people stupid, much like slashdot.
It's like myspace (social networking internet site, if you've lived under a rock at the bottom of a cave in the middle of Siberia for the past couple years), only themed more towards/integrated with college (and, more recently, high school, but not so much and separated from the college portion).
http://facebook.com/
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
So here's what companies see when the learn about sites like Facebook or MySpace: - Huge number of people - Vast majority are under 25 - Rapid word of mouth and hype spreading Now they think to themselves: "WOW, it's just like a TV show that gets millions and millions of teenage viewers---imagine the advertising potential! We'll make a fortune!" Unfortunatly for them, they're wrong. Commercials and product placements on TV are wildly different from those on the internet. TV requires you to watch them, and things can be soaked in subliminally with relatively little effort on the advertiser's behalf. Why is this? It's because people's attention is focused on what's going on, and the advertisements just slip in there most of the time. It's a fairly benign form of advertisement if you're engrossed in the program. Websites like Facebook on the other hand would require advertisements to distract the users from what they want to do. Banner ads and flash animations don't blend into webpages like a race car driver wearing 800 different brand names or a supermodel drinking a soda on TV. All internet ads do is to cause frustration and resentment among the users towards the product. So, while I'm sure advertisers wish that they could keep the same strategies and ideas that they have been using in TV, film, and radio for the last 100 years--sorry, you can't. The internet doesn't work that way. --- Just my 2 cents.
Friendster is reportedly up for sale: 5 dollars.
Google will pay someone to take Orkut off their hands, in Brazilian currency too!
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.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
And when I was in school everyone was on friendster.com. That service sniffed the $$$ and went to hell too. If all it would take to throw off facebook is a new innovative feature that would enthrall the masses, don't you think $2B would be better spent developming that?
walk around a university computer lab and everyone's on their facebooks all the time. people use it for class projects, to hook up, to organize parties, for everything. and when you get sick of it, you graduate, you might stop using it, but then a fresh new group of people sign up. it'll never be lame. and these are 18-22 yr olds, every company's dream audience..forever.
$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..
They're looking for $2 billion? For a site that is nothing more than a glorified bulletin board?
Apparently in 7 years peoples memories have fallen by the wayside.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I disagree with the idea that Facebook's registration system is its advantage because it closed--the advantage of the system is that it offers easy searching for people and arranges them in nifty, easy to understand hierarchies. Because Facebook requires registration from a college/high school email address the ease of searching and hierarchical arrangement is retained (whereas most people, I suspect, would default to signing up on Myspace with whatever aol.com or hotmail.com account they have.) This plus is a side-effect of the closedness, but I don't believe the closedness is an advantage all unto itself.
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.)
Friendster was one of the earlier social networking attempts (its name derived from napster's brief file sharing success). When I first tried to use Friendster its servers were as slow as molasses. Facebook launched on Harvard's InterNet-2 capacity servers before going private.
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.
After reading some comments on here, it seems that some of you put facebook in the same category as myspace. Facebook is much better than Myspace and here is why.
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.
sigh, when will these people learn that the net is in no way stagnant... as any long time user of these communities will tell you, dont expect any of them to be around for too long. instead of trying to play catch up with their competitors online, these large corporations should instead try to innovate (gasp!!) and perhaps start a new trend online. only then can they gain a real foothold.
trust me... as soon as facebook becames 'corporate' people will flee from it.
I see so many questions about why 2 billion dollars is being asked for the ownership of facebook... it's really quite simple. Aside from the pictures and messaging, each member of facebook can list interests, favorite quotes, books, movies, albums, etc etc etc. There is SO much information going around on facebook, and though it may appear useless by looking at just one individual site, the information from every facebook site is pretty meaningful to a marketer. Information is money, just look at google. Will all that data you'd be able to see trends, what products will work where, what's important to this generation, etc. The possibilities with facebook are enormous, and I'm actually surprised that it's not higher than 2 billion.