Facebook,arguably the biggest(Myspace days are fading out) Social networking website in the world has turned 5 years old today.Exactly 5 years ago,Mark Zuckerberg,a Harvard dropout bagged a domain “TheFacebook.com” and launched his self built social network.Rest of the story is history today.
Following Google,Facebook is certainly the next big internet company that came out of nothing and now raising unrealistic(remember $15 Bn valuation ?) expectations in the tech industry.Facebook has been steadily growing since its launch and has now crosssed a figure of 150m users worldwide.
It is now being speculated that the older social networking giant(Myspace) is slowly lagging behind Facebook,specially when only U.S. audiences are taken into consideration.
During the past five years,Facebook hardly remained out of buzz and kept making news for one reason or the other.From ‘Beacon controversy’ to ‘Facebook Connect'(from ‘bad’ to ‘good’),from Microsoft‘s partnership(on a skyrocked valuation) to the much popular rumors of Facebook’s IPO,every such thing regarding Facebook hit Digg’s homepage on a regular basis.
So,what’s up with Facebook’s IPO ? Is there any such possibility in an year or two ? Let’s get into some more details…
Facebook’s current workforce is more than 700 folks.The revenue figures are somewhere around $260 – $300 million with net income of around $50 million(rumored).Although,the social network was over-valued by Microsoft,a sensible valuation at the moment can be around $4-5 Bn.Another point to note here is that,despite traumatic economic conditions,Facebook hasn’t made its staff suffer(look at the crippled tech industry,scene is horrible) at all.
Considering that there has been over $500 million of VC investment in the company already,the company has to start producing fatty revenues now.Reminding you that Facebook,despite boasting 150m userbase and being 5th world’s most popular site,hasn’t been an overwhelming cash machine for the investors.Zuckerberg himself commits that Facebook’s priority has been steady growth and increased user engagement rather than higher CPM and similar stuff.
But one must also remember that current economy can cause traumatic nightmares for any company’s major stakeholders,that’s even thinking of an IPO.Hence,analysing every perspective about Facebook and current market conditions,we can safely foresee Facebook making a ‘Public debue'(or IPO) by mid 2011.