Facebook listing is coming!

Drop everything, because the word on the street is that Facebook (or as a friend of mine calls it, Book of Faces) is mulling an IPO next year. Awesome! For what though? Early stages still, but the suggestion is that the company could be valued at 100 billion Dollars and that the company would look to sell 10 billion Dollars worth of shares. Go Zuck! And who said that American innovation was dead? From zero to 100 billion from a university dorm room in less than 8 and a half years, have I got that right? If of course they are going to list in the first half of next year.

This WSJ article Facebook Targets Huge IPO says that it would eclipse Yahoo!'s revenue at the time of listing. Suggesting that Facebook has revenue of four billion Dollars. OK, does that mean that the company will trade on 25 times revenue? I hear you howling, how can that be possible? Well, if you need to know, LinkedIn trades on 28 times price to sales. But that does not exactly make it "alright". Google on the same metrics trades on a 6.5 times price to sales. Apple at 3.22 and IBM just shy of two and a quarter times, Microsoft a little over three times. But those are all very different businesses to Facebook and LinkedIn. The only company that I could find amongst the "related companies" on Google finance that looked way more expensive was Baidu.com, the Chinese internet search engine.

The ultimate question is, what would you be willing to pay as an advertiser to people whom you would know more about than any government or security agency in the world? You would know what they like, who their friends are, their exact age, where they live, who they are married too, exactly who their friends are, where they work, which places they visit and what photos they take, the list goes on. Quite possibly the most specific information that an advertiser could ever want, and there are 800 million people with Facebook accounts, 500 million of whom log on each and every single day. And growing, more importantly, many domains that Facebook have managed to crack. That is the ultimate question for me, how valuable do you think that information is? For a whole host of folks, specific advertising based on your status updates. For instance, you say something like, "Feeling tired and deflated, I need a holiday, :-(" and hey presto, in ten minutes or so, you get an advert for places close to you, based on your profiling. Imagine.