Yahoo's assumptions in 2006 about Facebook's future | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo's assumptions in 2006 about Facebook's future

techcrunch.com

64 pointsgdeglin34 comments

If Yahoo had've bought them, we wouldn't be here discussing facebok any more. It would've been sucked up into the Yahoo startup blackhole and well past the event horizon by 2011.

The comments from 2006 are also an interesting read: http://web.archive.org/web/20071028172358/http://www.techcru...

Other fascinating bits from that archived post:

1. It's amazing how many more comments there were on TechCrunch before Twitter sucked them all away.

2. It's amazing how many oddball bloggers there were back in 2006. All mostly gone and moved to Twitter/FB.

I don't think it is Twitter, I think it was the requirement that people log in with their facebook account that destroyed Techcrunch comments. I personally saw the number of comments drop off greatly as soon as they put in the facebook login.

Good point.

Another thing that's changed since 2006 is that I think publisher thinking about commenters has evolved to where they no longer see them as adding business value. Gawker made great attempts to court and build a commenting community on its sites from 2006-2009 only to decide that the commenters weren't really creating much value and were more trouble than they were worth. Now commenting is almost an afterthought on their sites and they don't really care to make it more readable.

i.e. Facebook comments might be a great fit for Techcrunch. They're dangerless and require little to no moderation.

I agree with this. I stopped posting for that very reason. I wouldn't post here if it was a requirement.

Actually Facebook comments reduced spams and sockpuppets. Previously most comments were outsourced PR noise from sockpuppets.

By 'destroyed', do you mean reduced the number of comments, or reduced their quality? I'm not a TC regular, but I've never been much impressed by their comment quality, either before or after the adoption of FB comments.

Everything about that link is gold.

One of the few prescient comments on that site is from a guy who apparently spends all of his time writing about Facebook.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071028172358/http://www.techcru...

Eric Eldon hitched his wagon to Facebook and just sold his company for $14 million. So much for being wrong 5 years ago.

As an aside, Eric was also a Y Combinator company founder a month or so after this article, though his YC company, WriteWith, was shuttered a short time after. Eric's a smart guy who works hard...so, not at all surprising that he'd go on to do interesting stuff.

The full text of this link should be required reading for all anonymous internet armchair valuation experts.

For those of us that don't have the numbers memorized, does anyone know what the actual numbers are for these predictions?

Things really heated up mid year. Yahoo proposed a $1 billion flat out acquisition price based on a model they created where they projected $608 million in Facebook revenue by 2009, growing to $969 million in 2010. By 2015 Yahoo projects that Facebook would generate nearly $1 billion in annual profit. The actual 2006 number appears to be around $50 million in revenue, or nearly $1 million per week.

These revenue projections are based on robust user growth. By 2010, Yahoo assumes Facebook would hit 48 million users, out of a total combined highschool and young adult population of 83 million

Facebook had somewhere around 1.5 billion in revenue in 2010 (http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/03/facebook-revenue-2010/)

Facebook had 500 million users at the end of 2010.

Interesting that they were almost bang-on for revenue, but off by an order of magnitude in users.

advertising revenues probably went down since then

I doubt it, their userbase is 50% bigger than it was a year a go. I think the last number they released was 750 million.

What's really rich is where Yahoo apparently thought Facebook would "reach" 50m members by 2010, sewing up 100% of the student population.

What's Wayne Ma up to these days?

Predicting the future is hard. At the time, most people seemed to think it was ludicrous that Yahoo was offering so much for Facebook.

Arrington wrote that post (I remember when we got the docs) - no idea why it is being picked up as 'Wayne Ma' (I don't know that name).

somebody obviously screwed up the last data migration.

it also sucks that all the old comments have not been migrated - there is a lot of interesting insight in the old tc comments. I don't think there is a way to migrate to the new comments, since a fb login is now required (which imo is ridiculous)

People talk about Larry and Sergey being visionary entrepreneurs, but they attempted to sell their vision for $1M to Yahoo at some point. Mark, on the other hand, has declined every offer to sell FB. I personally think the guy is visionary.

You don't think that Mark Zuckerberg's "vision" has anything to do with the precedent set by prior entrepreneurs, including Larry and Sergei? Think about the consumer-facing internet companies that existed prior to 1999 when Larry and Sergei were in the early stages of their company versus what Zuckerberg had to look back on in 2005. A lot changed in those intervening years between 1999 and 2005.

That's only because he succeeded. A lot of "visionaries" have become irrationally attached to failed ventures and drove themselves bankrupt.

It's not necessarily a good idea to get too attached to a business. The whole point of finance is calculated risk taking.

he also cashed out in the series A to make himself wealthy, which made selling early less attractive. With the Yahoo negotiations, there was a price he would have sold at, they just took too long to reach it.

sure that he cashed out so early ? Any source for that info ?

Its in 'The Facebook Effect'

Search was a technical achievement of such magnitude that the founders' first product was considered a seminal work in computer science. That is visionary bro.

I think the chances are greater of FB buying Yahoo now.

maybe they could buy yahoo, but why would they even want it?

For the domain? So mark can get the mark@yahoo.com email address he always wanted!

Yahoo has a massive user base that almost rivals Facebook and is still one of the top 5 websites on the planet.

It's amazing that Yahoo is still pulling so much traffic: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+yahoo.com+goog...

I'm curious, besides having locked in throngs of users with their free email system years ago, what other competitive advantages does Yahoo have?

Yahoo Finance is still the most popular consumer financial data site in the world, Flickr is the most common photo site used by professional photographers.

They have the #1 news site, #1 sports site, #1 finance site, and #1 entertainment site (they call it omg!) on the web.

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