Flavio about Business 2.0

A lot has happened in the past year in the market for Swiss party portals, famous for being a phenomenon only existing in Switzerland.
Just a few days ago, it was announced that tillate founders sold a big chunk of their stake to tamedia and now hold less than 14% in the company.
In september, Axel Springer bought usgang.ch and partyguide.ch

As Marc points out, the party mostly seems over for the party portals, seeing massive decrease in visitors, mainly because they were the first social networks to exist in Switzerland, had massive growth and users; But now Facebook, with its global reach, innovating rapidly and providing a relatively slick userinterface has taken the entire market.

Good for the founders to have sold now, as I don’t expect visitor numbers for any of these portals to increase in the future.

Just look at these numbers for Tillate:

Tough times for tillate

Laut und Spitz is not faring better:

Laut und Spitz Losing Ground

Usgang.ch is doing a little better, maybe because the rely less heavily on social networking but provide good insights into what parties are going down for a specific day/city.

Usgang.ch doing a bit better

To me these acquisitions look almost as bad as Holtzbrinck’s buying of Studivz, which is still not profitable and has again replaced their CEO, while Facebook is growing rapidly and already has over 1.4 mio German users.

While Facebook has enjoyed tremendous success in most parts of the world, recently reaching a 100 million active users, it has had real problems growing in Germany. Certainly because Studivz is a strong competition, stronger than I anticipated.

Now Facebook hired Smaboo, a company two friends of mine started a while ago to help them grow in the German market. So first, Congratulations to Adrian, Christoph and Marko for getting this deal with the hottest Startup!

They want students to organize Facebook parties in their universities.

But from a Facebook view, this cries for Desperateness to grow in this very contested market. This is the first time I have heard Facebook SPEND money in order to grow (I am not 100% sure that Facebook is spending money, but I certainly hope so for Smaboo, the students seem to be getting gadgets and party invitations more than real money). Their growth so far has been totally viral and free, they did not even pay the translation of the site.

Looking at the numbers, they are defintely not that exciting for Facebook:

It has 816′000 users in Germany, merely 1% of the population. Facebook France on the other hand boasts 3.3 million users, representing 5.2 % of the population. Or Switzerland, where 660′000 users represent 8.7 % of all Swiss.

It could also mean that Facebook is very confident that they will earn their money back with advertising once they have the necessary amount of users.

Essentially, Facebook is now copying Studivz in their marketing efforts to get German students on the platform, after they sued Studivz for having a similar design.

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)