BUSINESS WEEK — Mar 28 — Owners of the privately held social-networking site hope to fetch as much as $2 billion. And media giants like Viacom may make a good match. They have turned down a $750 million offer. www.facebook.com has become the seventh-most heavily trafficked site on the Internet, according to comScore Media Metrix. It racked up 5.5 billion page views in February. MySpace had 37.3 million unique and logged 23.5 billion page views, making it the second-most trafficked site after Yahoo, which had 30 billion. MSN had 18 billion. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, and the video-oriented YouTube, are a primary form of communication for younger people who can spend an hour or more a day at such sites.
The full article was originally published at Business Week, but is no longer available.
hi, Mark,
According to this presentation – http://www.radwin.org/michael/blog/2005/10/php_at_yahoo_presentation_.html – Yahoo is getting on average 3,4B DAILY page views. So, it´s a lot more than facebook or others.
thanks,
priit
The SEC filings say 3 billion.. Depending on what counts as a pageview I can say i have between 14 and 90 million a day. Given that facebook is worth 2 billion based on 5.5 billion pageviews does that mean i can sell my site for $200 million? 🙂
probably 🙂
Markus, as you understand realizing an exit strategy is trickier than selling anything else. First of all, what you have is a very fluid asset. Its positioning, traffic and page views and as the result, its value, change constantly. And what matters is a trend rather than a snapshot.
Second of all, it’s a time sensitive issue. What is trendy today and considered to be an asset may attract no interest tomorrow. That’s been the case with a high-tech boom in the turn of millennium.
Third of all, the value of your asset is very relative to whom you are talking to or who estimates it. And it’s a real challenge to find a company that would see merits in acquiring your particular asset. You need to be introduced to the right people at the right moment with the right opening line by the right protégé.
In a nutshell, you have to position and market yourself. You’ll have to decide either you are going after investors who buy your future cash flow or after a company that would see how PoF could improve its cash flow through the value added service.
The math you did doesn’t make any sense for 2 reasons.
1. Because it’s not a done deal with Facebook. They “hope to fetch.” Dream on!
2. If you apply the same math you did to the $580-mln MySpace-NewsCorp deal, you can get the PoF value of $345,531.00. That’s quite a deviation from $200 mln. There is plenty of methods for an asset evaluation. The bottom line is any asset is worth as much or as little as a buy is willing to pay for it.
M & A is a very sophisticated and multi-faceted process.
I do M & A for living in Toronto and New York.
If you do it wrong, your site is worth $9 for the name registration.
It’s gonna be interesting. Good luck, buddy! Keep us posted.
Google Romance Beta became available today.
If Google make it a free service that is most likely, all free sites will be gone on a blink of an eye led by PoF.
Markus, now you could practically see why if your site might worth $$$ yesterday, tomorrow it’ll be no more than $9.
Who’s next to penetrate the dating industry? eBay?
alexander 🙂
http://www.google.com/romance/profile.html
Whew! Markus is saved 🙂
Googles had been going around asking whats the best way to monitize dating sites via contextual advertising amoung other things. Yahoo has been covertly trying to figure out what would happen if they went free. Hiring someone as high profile as susan mernit to yahoo personals and then telling her to intigrate it with web 2.0 stuff makes no sense either. THis is because web 2.0 stuff doesn’t not work in a paid environment, but is amazing in a free site.
I don’t think anyone in the top 5 dating sites is under the illusion that the primary dating market will stay as a paid service. Once google enters the market yahoo will convert to free and the fun begins.