Actually it was $4,343.
Then we bought Carmen for $15,659, and threw a goat at Jesse
Yes, a goat. It sounds silly, and it is, but millions of people aged 15-40 are doing it.
Welcome to Facebook…a.k.a. FB
In the rush of social media and web 2.0 unguided fever, some have become a bit ostentatious when valuing websites. FB Founder, Mark Zuckerberg says that he thinks that FB’s current value is $15 billion. (Its a nice round figure, and I won’t pay him a dollar more for it!) Actually that figure comes from a 1.6% $246Mil investment by Microsoft. And with Google’s exodus of engineers and top college recruits signing on over at FB, hopefully Zucks has some incredible new ideas. Zuckerberg is, after all, a pretty smart (albeit mischievous) kid in our book.
So here is what’s baking the noodle – how is FB going to make money from the millions of subscribers it has?
When people go to Craigslist, they are there to buy something. They don’t upload photos of their newborn nephew. eBay uses a different model, but a user of eBay generally accepts the fact that she could be logging on to buy something. Regardless of a product’s price, the site facilitates buying and selling.
But will the frequently self-absorbed “Generation Y”-ers (including yours truly) make purchases from Facebook? Take a look at most of the people that use FB or Myspace and its like online crack. Typically their profiles are so cluttered with pictures and applications that you can hardly navigate the page. Its a usability nightmare, particularly when it comes to MySpace. So the question remains, what will Facebook do to make money?
Almost coming up on 2 years since I wrote this post, and it’s incredible to see how things have changed. FB, now on the border of 500 million users and a skyrocketing valuation figure, to advertise in Facebook was never in the business plan. For some campaigns we now spend 4x more on FB than Google.
Recently stopped by the Facebook booth at Ad Tech San Francisco just a few weeks ago, and their slogan: “Find Your Customers Before They Search.” My post above doesn’t send that type of message; will the self-absorbed FB user actually click an advertisement? YES, they do. And in fact, the ads are limited to 3 ads (with an image!) but typically there are 2.
Not only do they click the ad, but they also convert to emails and new business for our clients. If Zuckerberg would pucker up, I’d give him a big fat kiss!