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Comment by yurylifshits | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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