back to article How much is Facebook worth?

How much is Facebook worth? Hundreds of billions or spit? The answer to that question depends upon who you're asking: and indeed how you're doing the asking. “At what price would you buy Facebook stock?” will get you a very different answer than observing how many people are willing to dig into their wallets at that price. …

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  1. Code Monkey

    Stay well clear

    Zuckerberg and the 499 other select few will make a ton of money out of this. The rest of us should stay well clear. People who are still sore about missing the boat on Microsoft, Google, etc. will chuck money at it and regret doing so until Facebook is as relevant as Friends Reunited.

    1. Dave88

      Facebook

      I think the value of Facebook is about $24 billons dollars. Any suggestion?

      Dave,

  2. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Pint

    Worth?

    "Everything in the whole world is worth what anyone else is prepared to pay for it. And that’s it. Simple.” Or a simple version my old man always drummed into me, "What ever the market will stand, son."

    FB is worth a lot to the AD droids, get an ad and blast in front of 200 million people, you're laughing. To most people FB is useful, but not the be all end all and certainly not worth paying cash up front for, although they don't realise they are actually paying with a little slice of their liberty. To others it's a bloody security nightmare that should have been buried along with its creator, many moon ago, it's "worth more dead than alive" as they say in all the best movies!

  3. Tom Melly

    Market <> Art

    It seems a bit rich for Mr Hurst to be muttering about the market when his dealer and other owners manipulate it to hell and back in order to boost and/or maintain the prices of his works...

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      @Market <> Art

      Funnily enough, much like FB is doing...

  4. whats the point of kenny lynch?
    Unhappy

    thank the lords....

    damien has spoken...please ask him what he thinks about folks dying from cancer - i'm sure there's some wise words ready to spew out....

    oh facebook? it's worth a mint because it the next big all-encompassing entity that you can spend your virtual life in. seriously, it will include everything and google should be worried.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      "spend your virtual life in"

      Sorry, but you don't have a "virtual life". There is the time you spend on a computer screen, and then there's the rest of your life.

      Whether you spend your life having a good time in real, face-to-face friendship reunions, or online counting those that have bookmarked your virtual identity as "friends", is your business.

  5. jball
    Black Helicopters

    Remember: you are the product...

    ...not Facebook.

    This from a similarly themed article I read earlier this week:

    "Most on the net have yet to grasp that when they are on free sites – Facebook and Twitter as well as Google – they are not citizens enjoying a public service or customers whose wishes must always come first. They are the product whose presence the site owners sell to the real customers in advertising."

    For the rest:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/31/google-street-view-intrusion

  6. Rich 11

    Overvalued

    > “I’m one of the few people in the world who can say, ‘I know what everything is worth'," he declares. "Everything in the whole world is worth what anyone else is prepared to pay for it. And that’s it. Simple.”

    He certainly overvalues his own worth -- I bet he picked that up from playing Civilisation IV (which quotes the Roman writer who made the original statement).

  7. Atonnis

    One way or the other...

    Facebook will go one way or the other - it will either become such an ingrained, basic part of peoples' lives that the name won't mean so much any more as it'll be a standard across the world - or it'll go out of fashion/people won't be a*sed with the effort of keeping it up to date and will realise that they can go out and have lives instead of gawping at everyone elses' lives, or all talking about how they wish they had lives.

    Social networking will rely on mobile devices and automatic updating from people, provided they choose to make their lives accessible online for everyone to see. If people realise just how much danger they are putting themselves in by sharing everything they do with anyone in the world then suddenly mobile devices, etc will all be set to keep the data private, in private accounts, and at that point the social network sites will really start to ease away.

    I don't quite understand much of what is called 'social networking'. After all, what is there to talk about when you meet up with your friends if you've already told them everything, shown them everything and they're already bored of it because they saw all the pictures online? Wouldn't you rather have someone lean in close whilst you showed off the pictures on your phone?

  8. N2

    Nothing

    Even the steam off my pee has more 'worth'

  9. jubtastic1

    Depends

    Right now it's worth a bundle, Monetizing the users will start it down the slippery slope to irrelevance, but with 500 million users it's a goldmine of a slippery slope.

    Wait too long and something cooler will come along and make the decision for them.

  10. Stephen Channell
    Unhappy

    It’s the database, stupid

    How you value facebook is really no different from how you’d value any old-economy company, the difference is you keep the method secret. The “value” of facebook is the database of people and their relationships.

    Zuckerberg was surprised how many people were prepared to give him all their personal information.. and I’m fairly sure he has already worked out how to use the data..

    In the long term, facebook will be whipped out by closed yearbook comunities

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Depends

    The Internet's brief history is littered with the corpses of plenty of "next big things" that ultimately weren't. The ones that did score had a fairly obvious utility beyond what may have appeared as a novelty at the time, the others turned out to be little more than "what ifs" that in many cases paved the way to better - actually useful - things. Once the novelty of have your data pimped and being "friends" with a few celebutards has worn off, Facebook will slip gracelessly into the 'has been' category, burning a few greedy fingers on its way to being little more than a footnote in the Wiki.

    It all comes down to whether you think "worth" is really about price or value.

  12. No. Really!?
    Thumb Down

    Is it just me, or does...

    Facebook seem like another version of AOL?

  13. TeeCee Gold badge
    Dead Vulture

    Gosh, imagine if it went pear-shaped.

    How would the Reg Hardware hacks rate smartphones without that (allegedly) all-important Facebum integration to evaluate?

    Number of cupholders?

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What value is there in 500 million users chatting to each other?

    FB is worthless from a monetary point of view as far as I am concerned, I can’t even work out how they managed to keep the infrastructure running let alone make money!

    It’s a bit like back in the day when my dial up internet was completely free – because they would “make their money from advertising”. I though then that can’t possibly work – and a year later it didn’t and I was back to paying for my Internet.

    Very soon, the world will realise that actually, at least in its current form, there is sod all money to be made from 500 million people chatting to each other and looking at one another’s photos. They don’t click on any ads, buy anything or even provide any useful personal details that can be used for anything other than mass spam even if sold to the world+dog. So what if FB owns the photos etc, what worth is that?

    And that is why FB works, if you had to pay for it, or it was submerged in ads, people just wouldn’t use it.

  15. Adam Williamson 1

    "Claim your name"

    "I was sufficiently bored one day to claim my name"

    You can't actually 'claim your name' on Facebook (which is a good design decision). Facebook happily copes with multiple user accounts with the same real name. Just try searching for a common name (or even, many uncommon names), and you'll see multiple results; you have to look at some of the public data to figure out which one is the one you were looking for.

    1. Code Monkey

      Re: Claim your name

      Wasn't that about having a "snappy" URL like www.facebook.com/code.monkey* rather than www.facebook.com/?user=gobbledigook

      * if there is one it's not me

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    All Marks?

    Are you sure none of us are just plain Zuckers?

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not True

    "Everything in the whole world is worth what anyone else is prepared to pay for it."

    No, it's not. It's worth what *someone* is prepared to pay for it. To most people, Facebook stock isn't worth a light, and the same goes for Damien Hirst's art.

  18. Goat Jam
    Paris Hilton

    What is it worth?

    "It's as good a method as any other"

    Surely it is the *only* method.

    I once had a GF who was into buying antique cups and saucers (go figure) and she would drag me around the antique shops pointing at items with about half an inch layer of dust on them exclaiming "Wow, look how much that is worth!". I must have explained to her a hundred times that if it was actually worth whatever was written on the price tag then somebody surely would have bought it in the 30 years or so it had apparently been sitting there in the shop.

    The same goes for my old man, who is in Real Estate. He sees no end of punters trying to sell their houses for ludicrously inflated prices based on the fact that it is worth an extra 20 grand because they spent 15K putting in new carpet in their favourite shade of purple and they are wondering why it hasn't sold yet. He has to explain to these poor deluded fools that "no, it is not worth what you say, it is worth what somebody else is prepared to pay for it and they don't want to pay $20K extra for that revolting purple carpet"

    Paris, because I'd definitely pay for that.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    What is it worth?

    I would guess that Facebook is worth between about £100'000 and £250'000

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Headmaster

      What is it worth?

      Surely you mean £100,000 and £250,000? (go figure) It’s a bit like back in the day

      Sigh.

  20. Dave88

    Facebook

    Hello, guys

    In my opinion the Facebook net value is about $24 billion dollars. Other opinions?

    Dave,

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Dave

      Go ahead and spend your $24 billion on Facebook stock if you want to. Just don't come running back to us for charity when it's all gone wrong.

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