The sale of these websites makes me uneasy. Jared Polis, founder of bluemountain.com wrote his list of people who live in Boulder and said he just sold proFlowers.com. I haven't been able to find how much he sold that for.

Given the ridiculous amount of growth MySpace has seen since Murdoch bought it last year, $500 million is starting to look more and more like a bargain.

$2 billion for Facebook is a little ridiculous.

If they're doing any sort of data mining or advertising, it's probably a decent price.


Keep in mind, the going rate for a one month advertisement on sites with at least 2M pageviews and 1,000 distinct users is approximately $1,000/mo for a banner at $500/mo for a button. It doesn't take much to get to 2M pageviews and 1,000 distinct users if you've got any sort of forum or blog or gallery going on. (My two-year-old forum currently has a 4.5M/mo pageview, and it's not even big enough to go on big-boards yet!) And that's not for a constantly-up ad, that's for the kind that gets put in a fixed-number (say, 20 or 50) directory and is randomly selected.

I know those stats only because over the course of the year, we'll be changing it to a limited but free / expanded but ads / subscription basis because between my co-admin and myself, we spend approximately 70-80 hrs/wk admining the forum and need to be able to have money to pay for school and what not. We figure that if we charge $500/ad and sell 25 ads/mo, we can pay our forum costs (1 ad/mo) and have a fairly good salary, but we could have an acceptable salary with 8-10 ads/mo.

and I thought the adds on MySpace were annoying now...this can only lead to more pop ups and movies and sound clips running over and over on people's MySpaces

*clings to Livejournal* I'm never letting go!!!

no, you are not alone! MySpace needs to go away, far far away, and never return.

I don't understand how kids who have no patience with anything else are totally fine with MySpace's server issues - it takes me 3 try to log in, I'm constantly having to reload my browser...

*huggles Livejournal*

MySpace is the ass-end of the internet.

Dang, $2 billion??? I'd like a share of that money, please.

LOL! Them and their dark, underwater, cutthroat scurvy sea wars!

LOL. Anemones will whip you to death with their fronds.

Do you have a source, re: facebook on the auctioning block? Thanks. (:

I reckon that MySpace for 500 million was a really smart choice by News Corp. The phenomenon is out of control among highschool age kids. At local trendy youth franchise food consumption depots kids don't talk about other kids any more, kids talk about other kids' MySpace accounts. Those without MySpace accounts are social black sheep. Go to any teenage party and marvel at how much time kids spend with their cell phones whipped out snapping pictures. I've always wondered where all that generated data goes. Now I know: MySpace.

I think the MySpace thing has homed in on (inadvertantly) some key points that youths have really embraced. Broadcasting of memes (anything from certain myths/anecdotes [those Chuck Norris things], to online personality quizes, to certain images & videos), another layer of impersonality (it's easier to say - nice shoes, wanna fuck? - over the internet), which in itself is a huge deal.

Facebook, on the other hand, is just as ubiquitous in the undegraduate university scene. I think that Facebook is less valuable for advertising and more valuable for data mining. Don't think it's worth 2 billion dollars, but somehow I get an inkling that it's worth much more than 500 million.

Dunno, maybe.

Welcome to the next bubble ...