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)

Valleywag came up with an interesting map, showing which Social Networks have the highest penetration in each countries:

Interesting to see how Social Networks are distributed throughout the world. Lately, I have come under the impression that everyone is looking at facebook and that other players are loosing game.

But the bloggers, including Techcrunch, Mashable and my humbleness, might not see the entire picture.

In many regions of our world, facebook is very insignificant. In fact, if you look at the world map above, facebook dominates only very few countries. (Note: The map only shows the leading social network in a country.)

Now there acts the principle of the self-fulfilling prophecy: When bloggers talk about facebook and about how it’s platform is revolutionizing the internet, they are aggressively accelerating facebook growth themselves, by evangelizing it (absolutely for free, by the way).

Facebook indeed is a winner here, because they were the first to implement a platform for developers. They are thus gaining importance by the huge amount of attention they receive from the blogosphere. Linkedin’s or MySpace have just barely announced they’re planning the implementation of platforms, and have received only minuscule coverage.

The map also reveals that facebook might not have the impact everyone thinks it has. As pointed out by Andi, Facebook’s market share in Asia is close to zero, as well as in Latin America. Basically, everything except the anglosaxon part of the world.

Now obviously the arising question is: Will one player step up to plate and gain everything? Or maybe there is only one professional network and one student / fun network?

Interesting is also this article, showing how facebook and myspace mirror a class division in the USA.

No matter how strong facebook grows, they’re still very far away from myspace and will not overcome them anytime soon. Xing and Linkedin both hold very strong positions in their home markets and there is no signs of a consolidation in either one of them.

Maybe with the development of meta tools, which quickly allow to import/export profile and contact data, more appealing social networks might grow even quicker than now and actual take market share away from weaker players until they can’t carry on with their non-profitability.

Facebook is hype:

Now Facebook certainly has the biggest market share with students in the anglo-saxon world, while in the germanophone parts of the world, Studivz is still much stronger.

This is how they are growing internationally:

While it was always clear that studivz would never be able to beat facebook worldwide, the question arises on how long the studivz can sustain itsself when facebook grows in users and in features.

It is not that simple to compare user numbers in specific countries. The facebook network Switzerland has 16′000 users now, while Studivz claim they have 52′000 users in Switzerland. But a lot of people on facebook don’t necessarily join their regional Network. In fact, of my 136 total friends on facebook, only 71 of them are in the Switzerland network. I guess I have about 100 people that actually live in Switzerland as friends, which makes my guess at the penetration 70%. According to this, There would be 16k / 0.7 ~= 23k users from Switzerland. That’s already close to half of the Studivz users. How long until we surpass Studivz?

Let’s take a look at University penetration. ETH Zurich Network on Facebook has 8 people called Philipp. Studivz shows us 90 results for ETH. That would be a penetration of less than 10 percent, if we generalize over all students.

St. Gallen University has a better penetration in facebook: 23 Philipps while Studivz shows
72 results, this is roughly a third.

While it is hard to really compare how much penetration those networks have, two things are clear:

1. Studivz still has much more users in Switzerland and Germany
2. Facebook is growing fast internationally, also in those two regions.

The question we haven’t answered yet is, who grows faster?

Nevertheless, I would suggest that facebook will win sooner or later just because of their wider international reach ( you need facebook for your exchange student friends in the US/England. ) and their massive expansion strategy with facebook apps. They understand what’s important and what’s viral, execute fast and deliver results.