Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Are Twitterers worth more than Googlers?

Following up with an additional thought on the Twitter/Facebook saga... In yesterday's article, I approached Twitter's valuation from a "per twitterer" basis - arriving at an estimated value of $45 per twitterer based on Facebook's $500 million which is really worth $150 million using the "Henry Blodget Facebook valuation discount factor."

To put the $45 per user valuation in some perspective, Google's market cap is about $90 billion based on today's opening share price. Public estimates out there show that there are approximately 1.4 billion people in the world on the Internet. Let's discount that to 1.0 billion just in case that includes people that can access once a week or month, or people that can access email and aren't able to regularly use search. At about 70% market share in the search business, that comes to abut 700 million people.

$90,000,000,000 / 700,000,000 = $128 per Googler

If one assume that Facebook's $500 million offer was indeed a legitimate $500 million and not an $500 million in inflated currency, the price per twitterer that Facebook is $150 per user, which would mean that Facebook is valuing Twitter's users more than the market values Google's users. Twitter doesn't have a revenue model. I think Google does...

(Interesting side note - the first search result for the term - "how many people use google everyday" - is a forum post on answers.yahoo.com from May 31, 2006. Still some room for improvement and not surprising that problems like this crop up from time to time...)

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It always amazes me that so many internet companies don't have a revenue model. In these economic times, what are companies like seesmic or twitter going to do when funding from venture capitalists is drying up?