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Comment by ColinDabritz | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has over 800 million active users. (from https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics )

With a $100bn valuation, that would be $125 per user.

But hey, there's room for growth right?

Let's be generous and give them everyone in the world, recently about 7bn potential users total. That's $14.29 per user.

It's hard to imagine a business model that can leverage that kind of money per person on average, much less with all the people who are inaccessible for various reasons.

It's going to be interesting to see where they go with this.

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That's just simply valuing each user by dividing Facebook's estimated valuation by the number of users. I'm sure Facebook will not only continue to improve their revenue to constantly please the pencil pushers, but is it so crazy to value each user at $125? Remember, that's not revenue; it's just value per user.

Most public companies trade for at least 12 times their earnings. Google is 20x earnings and their market cap is $190 billion. Your math would be assuming that Facebook will have $0 in assets and will be trading with a P/E of 1. Earnings of $6.25 per year, per user (at 800 million users) justifies a $100B valuation at a 20x P/E with $0 in assets and no expected future growth.

I wonder what google's user equivalent value would be (vs FB's $125)

if all 7B people in the world used google, each one would be worth $27. If google only had 800M users like facebook, each one would be worth $237.

So maybe FB stock is actually undervalued if one thinks that Facebook provides an equal amount of value compared with Google.

Me too. It doesn't look like Google discloses their worldwide user count. It's got to be over a billion.

Seeking Alpha had some good analysis on this earlier in the year. http://seekingalpha.com/article/245326-is-facebook-already-o...

TLDR: Facebook's value should probably be closer to 11 Billion rather than 100 billion.

By the "fuck it, we're doing 5 blades!" principle, I predict that Facebook market cap will balloon to $1Trillion, and Zuck will spend a few minutes in the exclusive $200B-and-up club before HF trading automata crush him down to a merely-immortal $5B or so.

Like any other site's stats, that '800 million' is significantly inflated. As an anecdote, I know several people who have at least three accounts. It's disingenuous how companies rarely acknowledge that accounts do not have a 1:1 correspondence to individuals. I think that should be taken into account when speculating about revenue.

This particular number counts monthly active users. Your friends with three accounts would have to be active on the site at least once a month in each account for them to be counted in this total.

Yes, that's correct. I'm not referring to inactive or throwaway accounts. Many people I know have an account for a business, separate to their personal account, and some have multiple accounts to keep their work friends separate from personal lives, and they use each account frequently.

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