Flavio about Business 2.0

This VC thinks that Facebook is worth 100bn $. He’s running a facebook only VC Fund. He says the valuation of 100 bn $ is realistic if we have 200 mio users in 18 months (time of the IPO?) valued at 500 $ per user. Compared to the approx 100$ valuation of a Studivz User, that doesn’t even seem that unrealistic to me.

Very quickly, facebook could be worth as much as our friends at google: 160bn, at the time of this post. Not to mention yahoo, with a measly 30bn $ valuation. Maybe they should’ve bid a bit more when Facebook said no to 1bn $…

Enjoy the movie with courtesy of Facereview

See also:

Is Facebook worth $100 billion? Yeah, and here’s why: (highly recommended)

Bubble or not, someone is definitely making money with Web 2.0. And as it is with stock brockers who make money if the markets go up or down, the lawyers who make money whether economy is good or bad, Michael Arrington and Pete Cashmore belong to the winners.

A couple of months ago it was rumored that Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch makes around 120′000 $ a month. Someone close to Techcrunch told me it’s a whole lot more now. It must be, since they can afford to hire a full-blown Harvard MBA CEO and a couple of analysts/researchers.

But smart entrepreneur Michael Arrington is not resting on his highly successful blog. He since launched a uk, french and japanese version of techcrunch with it’s own editors. He also added crunchgear (a blog focusing on media gadgets) and crunchboard (a site to list Web 2.0 jobs for 200$) to his portfolio, slowly but certainly forming some sort of network, comparable to big media companies like Axel Springer in the printing world.

Recent additions include Techcrunch 20, a huge Web 2.0 conference and crunchbase, an attempt to profile all the web 2.0 companies in one database. Posts on Techcrunch no longer link to the company website, but to crunchbases entry of that company.

Techcrunch’s biggest competitor is Mashable, a blog focusing exclusively on social networks (as opposed to anything Web 2.0 on Techcrunch) and edited by UK-based Pete Cashmore.

Mashable also has it’s french version and has recently added a social network to it’s blog.

Taking a look at the Alexa numbers we can see that Mashable is gaining terrain, very quickly:

Compete even tells us mashable has overtaken(!) Techcrunch in reach. These numbers are only valid for US visitors though, but certainly indicate a clear trend!

There are a couple of elements that differ with Mashable from Techcrunch:

Mashable, for example, is clearly inviting users to submit their news stories. whereas Techcrunch makes it quite an effort to contact them.

While it seems easier to get on mashable, it might soon also get you more attention than being techcrunched. On the other hand, being techcrunched always has something more prestigious to it.

In a time where TV and Print Networks are losing consumer attention to the internet, Online Networks with relevant (long-tail) and up-to-date stories will become more and more important. And user clicks mean advertising dollars.

It’s clear that both Pete and Michael first started their blog as a hobby, but have since turned them into real companies with several employees each. Other people write for them and they have successfully leveraged their brand, they can now enjoy smart analysts blogging for them while having a nice share of the ads income of their site. Well done!

Here’s a video taking a look inside facebook. Note that people say as much as they do at google.

I’ve been observing the growth of the regional networks inside facebook. Recently, the facebook Switzerland network has reached more than 20′000 users. That’s up from 3′000 users at the beginning of the year, so thats a 600% increase in just 6 months. Compared to the penetration in Germany, facebook is doing very good in Switzerland:

Facebook Germany has close to 50k users, so that’s 49,146/82,314,900 = 0.0597% of Germany’s population.

Switzerland comes to 0.273% , almost five time the penetration than Germany. This also means that every
365th person from Switzerland is already on facebook. And be reminded that these are the people that actually join the regional networks. It would be interesting to know the ratio of users who joined a regional network versus users from that country. If we assume only 50% join, then we have 40k facebook Switzerland users and every 180th person is already on facebook! I am confident facebook is slowly but certainly taking over studivz in Switzerland.

Facebook is really changing the way we can interact with people. You can now finally find all those people you know but never exchanged numbers or email addresses. You can look up the girl you have a crush on. You can also see who her boyfriend is ;-).

Their name is enough to find them. What will happen, when 1 out of 2 people are on facebook? When your boss is on facebook but also your parents, all your work associates, your future wife? If you’re under 30, the probability that you’re future wife/husband is on facebook is quite high I would say. What’s gonna happen when you met the person? Are you going to look them up next day? yeah, sure. You’ll know more about them than they could possibly tell you: who their friends are, all their favourite movies, where they’ve been etc.

Other regional networks are growing as well:

Italy: 22,633
France: 55,285
Austria: 8,153
Spain: 23,670

England of course has several 100k, divided into individual networks.

Clearly, Switzerland has a predominant position when it comes to users per population. Why is that so? Maybe because Switzerland has a lot of international schools, whose students come from the anglo-saxon world and then started inviting their local friends. Switzerland has also been a country where early social networks like tillate.com, usgang.ch, partyguide.ch already had a lot of users and still have, so that the popularity of social networks is already given.

In fact, those partynetworks are probably much bigger in Switzerland than facebook and studivz when it comes to users. Tillate alone has 200′000 members, about 90% from Switzerland according to WEMF.

The attribute that really differentiates facebook from all the other social networks (except linkedin and xing) is that people are using their real names. That creates a huge impact on how people interact with each other, facebook for example is a much more trusted place than myspace. Will it become THE people directory of the world?