Rupert Murdoch got a deal when he bought MySpace for $580 million, because the next social site to be bought will be Facebook but it’s going to go for over a billion dollars.
There were rumors a few weeks ago about Facebook going after another round of venture capital funding with a high 9 figure valuation attached to it, but I can’t imagine why they’d need any more money. Facebook is still a smaller company, and their corporate-sponsored groups and advertising pull in the megabucks (from what I’ve heard.) I’ve heard from a few sources close to the company that they recently turned down an acquisition offer that was close to or right at $1 billion, and BusinessWeek’s latest article on Facebook puts a $750 million number on that rumor so my sources were pretty accurate.
MySpace is king of the younger and music-oriented demographic, and Facebook is king of the college and early 20s demographic. MySpace is the Hollister to Facebook’s Abercrombie, and we all know that once middle school kids get out of their Hollister phase what clothing line they run right into.
85% of college students (whose college is registered with Facebook) use the service, and that number has nowhere to go but up, if that’s even possible. So just like MySpace youngsters get older and go off to college and use Facebook, college students graduate and go off to the real world and then use, what…. LinkedIn? Yup, that’s the progression. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook provided a service to bring together Facebook users who have recently graduated and now want to network with other people not just to party and have casual sex, but to find jobs (and still have casual sex.) We’ll have to wait and see.