Facebook: Facing the $15 billion Wall
That’s right! The rapidly picking up social networking website, Facebook launched on February 4, 2004 is said to have users writing to each other using a feature called as Wall of Facebook and it seems that this site could have a pricy wall after all.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and the membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College which got expanded to other Boston area schools, Rochester, Stanford, NYU, Northwestern, and all Ivy League schools within two months.
As of July 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 34 million active members worldwide and it also became one of the most visited websites taking a place of 7th ranking.
The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that U.S. colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
The site is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads and sponsored groups and revenues were said to be around $1.5 million per week at one point of time.
In May 2005, Facebook raised $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and on August 23, 2005, Facebook bought the domain name facebook.com from the Aboutface Corporation for $200,000 and dropped “the” from its name.
On May 2007, Facebook launched an API that allows the development of applications to be used on the site, known as Facebook Platform.
In June, the partnership begun the previous year between iTunes and Facebook continued, with the download service again offering free music samplers through the Apple Students group.
In July, Facebook announced its first acquisition, purchasing Parakey, Inc. from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. To top it all off the great wall then also hired YouTube’s former CFO Gideon Yu on July 24, 2007.
The original big wall, the Wall street Journal reports that software giant Microsoft wants to buy a stake in Facebook before Google does and to top the icing is the pricing which is valued at around $10 billion.
The article seems to further add fuel to the fire by stating that this social networking site might hold out for a higher valuation than Microsoft is willing to agree on as much as $15 billion. Now that is one heavily priced Wall, isn’t it?
Facebook’s appeal to the massive audience out from every corner of the globe is that huge today. With growing internet users worldwide in billions, companies want to take advantage of such huge social media marketing opportunities on the site.
It has come to levels where people have started saying that this could be the next GOOGLE in the making.
It has all the great qualities of reach, rapidly increasing awareness, innovative style and loads of novel ideas for the growing users. It is definitely raking in all the big bucks with $30 million in profits on $150 million in revenue.
Well for the day, Facebook has a long way to go to be the next Google.
The question is whether Microsoft or Google, who would get their hands on Facebook first. With the big gates fighting page to page for a stake in the Wall the stakes only seem to be looking better for the newest face in the world of social networking.
With the increasing revenues and the millions of new user’s every day, let us watch who gets their hands on first on this quickly growing wall of FACEBOOK.