Valuing Facebook and Its 800 Million Customers: A $100 Billion Option on Unknown Future Strategies

1. How do you value a company like Facebook?

• Does the new company enjoy a market that is potentially larger than the like? Will its market grow?
• Does the new company already enjoy a bigger share of its market? Does it face dangerous and powerful competitors, or will its share grow?
• Does the new company serve more concentrated and powerful customers, or are its customers small and independent?
• Does the new company rely on a more complex distribution system than the like, or can it reach its customers more easily and more directly?

1. Has there ever been a company like Facebook?

Not much of anything, anywhere, is completely new. Still, after 15 years, ecommerce is used mostly for the selling of traditional goods and services. Online commerce is not about selling frisky electrons (or frisky photons, actually); it is still about selling the goods and services they describe. Perhaps the truly e-est of today's online apps is World of Warcraft, where people who have never met, meet and cooperate on complex quests to achieve tasks, that, well, don't exist.

Facebook may not be as purely e as we once imagined online commerce would be, but it certainly is cool. About 800 million people use Facebook to communicate, to keep in touch, and to share photos, stories, and updates on their activities. They use it to communicate their likes and dislikes about ideas and companies and products. And increasingly they use Facebook instead of phone, email, texting, and other forms of messages to coordinate their activities in real time. Facebook may have started as a way to find a classmate or learn what a classmate did, but it is turning into a mechanism for coordinating activities and deciding what to do. This encompasses anything from coordinating a group's activities or finding a date to planning and executing a revolution and overthrowing a government.

But how much of this is new? Social networking itself is not new. As humans we have been networking since, well, before we were human. Our closest living primate contemporaries have social networks, and our proto-human and pre-human ancestors must have had social networks as well.

1. So what's the like?

What does Facebook do? More importantly, what does it allow us to do? How do we use it? How do we want to use it and how will we use it in the future?

1. Now what do we do?

1. Not so fast

1. And while we're worrying ... will users accept this business model?

• What if Disney tracked, forever, every movie I saw and every product I bought, and everyone I saw the movies with? Actually, this is probably OK. It's hard to get safer than taking your own kid to see The Little Mermaid. There are unlikely to be any X-rated skeletons to worry about later.
• What if Verizon taped all of my interactions, both voice and DSL-based? What if they did this without needing a wiretap authorization? What if I could lose my job for something stupid I said over the phone? What if I could really piss off a family member, or a spouse, with an unguarded word or two over the phone? What if I changed my mind, a week later, or a year later, about how I felt about my family member or my spouse hearing those unguarded words? More significantly, how would I feel if the monetization of this information became the value proposition and the business model for FedEx, if regulation were largely absent, and if I had little or no control over how information was used later? Is this really the basis of a communications company?
• We can ask the same questions about FedEx. What if they recorded everything you bought as a

1. Assuming that users will accept this business model, is it working?

Verizon reported revenues of $106 billion, almost exactly the same as its market cap. By that measure Facebook's valuation should be $4 billion. Now we need to expect Face book to grow its user base or its revenues per user by a factor of 25. Increasing the user base by a factor of 25 would require Facebook to have more than 20 billion users, or more than the total population of the planet, which is clearly impossible. Alternatively, to be valued at $ 1000 billion as a Telco they would have to increase their revenues per user by an enormous multiple, which clearly they have been unable to do to date.

But Facebook wants to be valued as an ad company, so let's compare them to an ad company. The New York Times reported total revenues last year of almost $3 billon. Its digital subscriber base is under 400,000 including online subscriptions to the International Herald Tribune. Add traditional, printed edition subscribers to the Times and The Boston Globe, ignore double counting, and you still end up with a subscriber base safely under 1 million. So the Times' revenue per subscriber works out to be 500 or even 600 times greater than Facebook's revenue per user. Yes, the Times has been around longer, but it is supposed to be in a dying industry. But Facebook has been around long enough to figure out how to monetize the US, and it has not done so as an ad company. Additionally, its prospects for ad revenue in emerging African and Asian markets may be limited.

1. Indeed, can this business model work?

Can an ad-based social network business model succeed? Do we want ads during a social interaction?

Are ads appropriate in a social interaction? Did you ever try to sell a used car during your speech as best man at a wedding? Did you ever try to sell life insurance while speaking at your daughter's graduation party or your best friend's graduation party?

Are ads effective in a social interaction? We may tolerate ads on Facebook, but only because they are so easy to ignore. We may tolerate them, but do they work?

The time we really want product recommendations based on personalized information is during search. When I am searching for a hotel in Chicago I want to know where my friends have stayed and what they liked. When I am looking for a restaurant recommendation in Shanghai, I want to know where my friends like the food, the service, and the beer list. The time that information about me, my preferences, my friends, and their experiences would be most useful is during search, not social interactions.

And Google+ is tying up the market for social search. It's not just doing implementing social search, it's integrating Google+ with Google search to an extent that is truly dangerous to Facebook, Twitter, and everyone else who had hoped to use data on their users to implement their own form of social search.

1. So is Facebook worth $100,000,000?

• If it finds a business model based on providing value to its users
• And if it can find a way to serve its users, rather than serving ads to its users
• But as an ad company it will have a hard time competing with Google
• And indeed, as an ad company that compromises its users privacy in order to sell ads, it is likely to find it's tough to compete with Google+ and tough to avoid future regulation.

My guess is that the business model is going to be based on some form of subscription fee. The fee certainly will be less than most US Facebook users already pay for internet access or cable TV. It will almost certainly be less than they pay for texting and cellphone service, even if they are simply an added line on their family's service. It would be a major policy reversal for Facebook and its founders. It would be a major shock for Facebook's user base, and would inevitably drive some of their users away. But I suspect that after the shock wore off many Facebook users would be happy to pay a monthly fee for a social network that is amusing, communicative, and safe.

So what's the $100 billion for? It's an option on Mark Zuckerberg and his 800 million Facebook friends. It's an option on whatever future monetization strategy Facebook may develop. That value may be high. It may not be unreasonable.

I have to stop now. I have Facebook notifications pending.

These numbers were all obtained online from http://finance.yahoo.com/ the week of 3 February 2012, so that out analyses would be consistent with the early analyses of Facebook's valuation.
It is possible to argue that it is government's obligation to use its regulatory powers to protect individuals from actions that may harm them later, even if they have no desire to be protected. Tobacco regulation obviously falls into this category. It is not necessary to examine this debate in the article. If regulatory concerns do emerge, this may also affect Facebook's valuation, as we note later.