Anyway, Mashable has a post titled “Yahoo’s Biggest F*ck Up: Not Buying Facebook” which pretty much says it. According to recent data, Facebook has around 21 million registered users who generate about 1.5 billion page views a day. 93% of Facebook’s users are active (around 19 530 000 users) and log in at least once a month and 60% (around 12 600 000 users) log in once a day. Those figures are mindboggling. They also mean that Facebook is worth a bomb in advertising revenue alone. If Zuckerberg placed Google AdSense ads on Facebook he could comfortably buy groceries from some foreign destination. I was told that a large online site can charge 15 cents (ZAR) per page view for advertising on the site. Even if you work with 10 cents per page view you are looking at around R150 000 000 or roughly $21 000 000. I may be off with the numbers but if they are even close, Zuckerberg could be doing quite nicely. In fact, according to Mashable, a purchase price for Facebook could be closer to $3 billion. So yes, maybe Yahoo! should have taken the deal.
On the other hand, the value of these sites depends on the numbers. There is a window of opportunity for the lucrative sale of a social networking site before all the cool kids head off to the next big site and take all their friends with them. The time to bite is when the site is still pumping because when the users move then there goes the value with them because that value is the users.
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web advertising, facebook, yahoo!, social networking
What do you think?