Hacker News Reader

Comment by MisterOctober | Hacker News Reader

Yep. I resisted FB for years, but finally gave in in ~2009 due to pressure from old school pals, after what I thought was a thorough risk/benefit analysis.

Turns out that I _vastly_ underestimated the risk. I quit FB in ~2012, but not before I had already experienced some pronounced ill effects. Kind of like my auntie with smoking .

View on HN

Also yep. Facebook is valued at $158 per user. There is absolutely no way that the average user will click on $158 worth of ads in their entire time on the platform, nor will their children, nor will their grandchildren. At some point, a sane person has to realize that Wall Street is pricing in something other than the net present value of all the ad revenue that Facebook generates. Their buildings and servers are worth peanuts to their $227 billion market cap. What the market is pricing in addition to the advertising is how Facebook sells your data to companies for uses that most people have never even considered.

https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/

That piece wasn’t doing proper due diligence. It used Yahoo whose value at the time was already known to be largely from Yahoo Japan and Alibaba.

For Facebook it was ignoring their other assets of FBM, IG, and depending on the date, Whatsapp.

Also domestic, European, other developed countries. and the rest of the world all have much different user values. Some places are barely monetized at all right now.

Actually, in my experience that number is low.

- Facebook Advertiser with $500k in annual spend (mice nuts actually)

I suspect whale users on Facebook are worth way more than $158 lifetime.

I joined Facebook in 2015 (late to the party, I know) but have never really touched Newsfeed. It's exclusively a messaging platform for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com