A Billion Here, a Billion There, and Pretty Soon You’re Talking Real Bollocks
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 26, 2007 at 12:01 AM PT
MySpace is worth $65 billion in the same way that Facebook is worth $15 billion–hypothetically.
This according to RBC Capital Markets, whose media specialist David Bank (analyst of News Corp., which owns MySpace along with this site) applied Facebook’s $357 per-user valuation to MySpace’s 185 million registered users to determine the social network’s “Facebook value” (Zuckerberg Quotient?)
Not that Bank believes either company is worth that kind of money. Especially Facebook. After all, the company is expected to generate just $150 million in revenue in 2007. Apply that to Facebook’s $15 billion valuation and you get a price-to-sales ratio that is, let’s face it here, insane. Is $1 worth of Facebook’s sales really worth 7.1 times more than $1 worth of Google’s (price-to-sales ratio: 14 to 1) or 17.5 times $1 worth of Microsoft’s (price-to-sales ratio: 5 to 7)? To Mark Zuckerberg, maybe.
“Facebook’s true value isn’t $15 billion,” Bank said. “The deal with Microsoft isn’t the same as buying something for $15 billion.”
