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Opinions: Facebook not worth its $15 billion price tag


"Do you have a Facebook?" has become a common question asked upon meeting a student as a way of getting in touch later. I do have one, but I rarely use it. After the first few weeks of getting it at the beginning of my freshman year in 2005, I got bored with it.

However, millions of college students and even large corporations still find it intriguing. It has even been recently appraised to be worth $15 billion. For something that makes less than $200 million in revenue, I don't really see how it's actually worth that much, including revenue from advertising. Microsoft spent $240 million to get a less than 2 percent share of the popular site. I'm not sure what they think they're going to get out of it.

I barely feel motivated to check my Facebook.com account more than once a month, so I'm not sure how anyone feels it's worth millions other than attention whores that flock to other social networking sites like MySpace.com. I didn't really mind it until they came up with the Mini-Feed; I don't really care who just got a haircut or who has a hangover and went to class still drunk.

The gift function, the only one that will charge users, baffles me. Maybe people would use their one free gift to send to someone, but when they can poke people and use other functions for free, why would they pay a dollar to give a little icon to someone? I wonder what percentage of users actually buy and use them. The few people I have talked to about it also think it's stupid, so if Facebook.com is looking to make some money to increase their revenue to actually be worth billions, they're going to have to find another way.

Providing other services or means of entertainment for a fee to make Facebook.com less boring could bring in extra revenue, but what student is going to pay for silly little things when they're already getting some for free? College students may be a large part of the ring tone market, paying for little blips of songs for a ring tone, but I don't think charging for little games will go over well with mostly college-aged users.

Right now there is only one ad displayed on users' profile pages and one on the search page. For one of the top 10 most visited sites on the Web with over 40 million active members in one of the most important age groups, it seems almost foolish that advertisers haven't taken advantage of all the publicity their products could get. Of course no one wants a bunch of ads clogging their pages, but something needs to make their site worth billions. MySpace.com takes advantage of advertisers eager to get consumers aware of their products and Facebook.com should follow suit.

The major tie-ins that MySpace.com has with bands and new movie releases, featuring exclusive concerts and full front page integration of ads, reach tens of millions of users and give MySpace.com a boost in profits for popular upcoming events. This tactic used by MySpace.com shows that they're using their large user base to their advantage, unlike Facebook.com, which does little to take advantage of numbers to increase revenue. Facebook.com should try to find tie-ins that benefit users by providing exclusive content to things that interest them. Blanketing the site with poorly-targeted ads will do no good.

For those addicted to Facebook.com, paying a small fee to get full advantages of the social networking service is probably much less painful than going through withdrawal symptoms from losing access to all their favorite aspects of the site. With millions of addicted users, a few dollars here and there can really add up.

Facebook.com's Marketplace is free for people to post items for sale. Classified ads are a quick and easy way to make money, and with all the users looking to sell their stuff, a small charge per word or per day could also add up to bring in more to raise profits.

With no real explanation on why Facebook.com is worth $15 billion when most applications are free and the pages lack advertising, there are plenty of things to bring their revenue closer to what they are supposedly worth. Zuckerberg and Co. need to start thinking about these things if they want to live up to their reputation and not fizzle out like popular sites of the past.

Monique ignores the e-mails she gets from Facebook.com when people write on her Wall, so flame her at: monique.devoe@asu.edu.


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