Watching the meteoric rise of Facebook has been fascinating. Even just a few years ago, it was viewed primarily as little more than a place for young people to interact, not a place that brands needed to be concerned with. This has of course changed completely.
Today there are plenty of important social networks in America, each filling an important niche. But Facebook doesn’t inhabit a niche. It towers over every other social network. It has over 500 million users … and a major motion picture!
Even considering this prominence, a couple of recent articles on Facebook by Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington on are nothing but eye-popping. In a Sept. 1st article, Arrington writes that Facebook has unofficially claimed that revenues will exceed $2 billion in 2010. In another article, Arrington outlines how Facebook has been poaching talented employees from Google. He claims that Google employees are rejecting spectacularly huge counteroffers from Google to join Facebook, mostly because of the promise of stock options.
According to Arrington, Facebook has been quietly suggesting that the company’s stock will be valued at $100 billion in the next few years. The promise of making millions off of 1/10000s of the company’s value has been attracting top talent. This kind of valuation would put the company in the upper echelons of corporate America. Seems ambitious, and hitting that number may take more than a few years, but it looks far from unlikely. It’s been said that Google was the Microsoft of the ‘00s, and Facebook will be the Google of the ‘10s. Facebook’s value has just begun to grow. While Google will continue to grow if it makes the right moves and continues expands beyond its core business (search) in the right directions, the sky is the limit for Facebook.
Current search engines are fast maturing, and as search becomes increasingly social, Facebook is set up to reap the benefits. Facebook has barely scratched the surface of various businesses it could dominate. Email, ecommerce, entertainment, finance even!
How about watching TV from within Facebook, where the company would get a cut of the profits every time you click on a character’s shirt and buy it with your Facebook credit card? Or what if Facebook tracks all of your purchases online and offline. Using Facebook places, Facebook often knows where you are. They’d have unprecedented power to suggest purchases and coupons to you, getting a cut out of all kinds of purchases you make. I’m confident that Mark Zuckerberg and his top brass have fleshed out dozens of potential revenue streams beyond the Facebook ads that currently pepper the site.
I don’t know what they have in mind, but I’m confident that all of our lives are going to be getting a lot more social in the next few years, and Facebook will be finding $$ in unprecedented places.
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