Mobile Computing News

Photo: Facebook

All that time your parents dismissed your social networking mastery – which they obviously mistook for addiction – did they know you were part of a project to build a colossal tech company now valued at £22 billion?

As per second market transactions, Facebook is valued at a whopping $33.7 billion (£22 billion)! How big is that exactly? Oh, nearly twice the size of Yahoo, which is valued at $18.3 billion (£11.78 billion) and a bit larger than a tiny little company called eBay, which itself is valued at $30.1 billion (£19.38 billion).

Could it possibly be worth that much?

Facebook revenue is not official since the company has yet to go public, and this valuation comes from the price early investors or employees with stocks in the company have been able to trade their equity at on private markets like Second Market. If one were to assume the valuation any market gives you is a true reflection of how much you’re worth, than sure, the social network is certainly worth that much money. But the dotcom burst certainly confirmed that the market is not always right, so as armchair investors with no skin in the game, we take this figure with a pinch of salt.

Using back of the napkin crude mathematics, that twenty-two billion pounds valuation makes each of the service’s half a billion users worth £44. Granted, Facebook cannot monetise every user but it does put in perspective how the Facebook revenue challenge diminishes as the service tacks on even more users.

Social services + mobile devices = the digital revolution

Things are changing fast in the world of technology. With the advent and rise of social networking, location-based services, and all manner of digital ways to connect with friends or people with similar interest, a brand new technological sub-category has sprung. Add that to mobile devices like smartphones, which are quickly becoming the centre of our technological lives, it’s obvious Facebook could well be worth what people on the second market are prepared to pay for it.

It’s no surprise that of all the tech companies in the world, the one leading mobile phones profits – Apple – and the one leading the social networks revolution – Facebook – take up a lion’s share of the news.

We’re watching the Facebook revenue and profits game with keen interest. Everyone’s watching.