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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it's a bubble, but Facebook is used by an eighth of the people on the planet.

Tell me that's not an asset. A single company has lots of information about and can display advertising to an eighth of the alive human race.

Then again, so does Google, I suppose.

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Its an asset but what is the value (in dollars and cents)?

What the market decides. Just like with Ford.

>> They have an eighth of humanity as users.

If anything, that brings FB into a whole new realm of risk. Combine this with the fundamentals ( or lack of ) and it seems better left untouched.

The English language is spoken by a larger number - that doesn't mean the OED is worth a trillion $

The OED doesn't know your social connections, your sexual orientation, your date of birth, your address, your previous address, your current location, your gender, your age, your interests, your employer, all the websites you've visited or even what you look like.

So, they have good information for advertising. And that's going to valuable, no doubt...

...but that's it. They aren't building a physical product, they're going to sell other people's products. Or, sell information so that other people can sell other people's products.

I find it absurd that the market for web based adverting, between Google and Facebook and others, can be this valuable in the long run. These are advertisers, for crying out loud. People can talk about how many users Facebook has, but there are more automobiles worldwide than there are Facebook users.

What is worth more; a car purchaser, or a Facebook user?

Ford is one of many car manufacturers, Facebook is a de facto monopoly when it comes to social networks.

Facebook is a de facto monopoly when it comes to social networks.

Didn't that used to be true of MySpace?

The difference is that Facebook is "threatened" by an intangible, hypothetical competitor who doesn't exist yet. Nor does the mechanism for defeating Facebook appear obvious or inevitable.

Whereas Ford faces very real, present competition in a market full of extremely competent players.

NBC Universal has done pretty well with an advertising funded business model, very valuable for a long time. Facebook does have a product. It is just intellectual, not physical. Also, they have good information, AND a stage to sell advertising. This is, and will continue to be, a killer combo that I would want my money in.

Also. We don't know what is in the pipeline for the future. Who would have thought Google would build a dominant Mobile OS? Even Google didn't know!

Also it's good to note that their are companies being built on top of Facebook. Zynga is an obvious one but there are many smaller game companies, ad companies..ect and Facebook takes a cut of all of these

> What is worth more; a car purchaser, or a Facebook user?

You're talking like the answer to this question is obvious. People will keep cars for 10 years, and they're as likely as not to get them from Toyota instead. At this point, Facebook is probably making a little bit of money (indirectly from Ford advertising) from that car purchase. Not as much as Ford, sure, but Facebook extracts a little bit of revenue from many, many consumer transactions.

> there are more automobiles worldwide than there are Facebook users.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+cars+are+on+th...

There are 76 countries that have "unavailable" information, meaning the metric is based off of registered vehicles, somehow. Really, no one drives a car in Cuba? I've been there, and there are cars. Somalia? Well, I watched Black Hawk Down, and they had cars there too. There are far more cars than that number. I've seen the estimate at a billion:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/23/car-population_n_934...

All that leaving aside the fact that car companies build other things, like heavy equipment and military vehicles.

Advertising is not nearly so effective as to warrant such a high value for a facebook profile. I'd put a week's pay that, in retrospect, we'll see Facebook's IPO as the beginning of the bubble's pop.

This is a stupid statement. Hundreds of millions of people aren't reading OED every day.

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