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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Are Facebook's users worth $100 each to the company - all 500m of them? Really?

Well, Google has essentially the same number of users and is traded at 190B capitalization. So, a Google user is worth over $300. As people spend more time on FB then at Google, I can understand why FB user is seen as $100 asset.

Well stated argument, but I think Google (at present) is much more diverse a company product-wise, and way better at monetization in terms of screen real estate and multi-modal revenue streams. (infrastructure, ad networks, functional products, etc)

Virtual gifts aren't changing the world anytime soon.

A reasonable point, but Google has several years' worth of results under its belt. When the IPO was conducted I think the company was valued at about $25 billion; now it has net annual earnings about $6-7 billion - so while the P/E ratio is still high, at least it's based on actual numbers. I'm not saying FB couldn't be worth even more than Google - it's just that since they've never had to file earnings statements etc. yet, all such estimates are far more speculative.

http://www.google-ipo.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Financing_and...

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/03/04/investors-bet-on-pric...

I imagine Goldman Sachs has access to numbers that are a lot less speculative than the ones we have access to.

Or Goldman is so loaded with money that they have to put it somewhere - anywhere.

Oh another (more probable?) possibility.

Goldman invested into FB - so they can now act as marketmaker for their customers.

Another thing that's included in Google's market cap is their technology and assets. The # of users might make up a portion of it, but it's not fair to just divide the market cap/users and come up with a figure that's easily comparable across companies.

Now that you put it that way, why not? Maybe not all of them, but the high-spending ones offset the poorer ones, no? That being said, I've read earlier that Fb actively dangles the $100Bn valuation post-IPO scenario to lure new hires. So perhaps it's not entirely a surprise that GS wants in on some action.

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