September 22, 2006 | Friday

Facebook and Yahoo: A match made in bubble hell?

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Quotations |Search Engines |Google |Yahoo

Techdirt’s take on the potential sale of Facebook to Yahoo makes for amusing - and, I’d say, spot-on - reading for a Friday afternoon.

Just a few months ago, you were following the Skype inflated buyout plan to order, setting yourself up with a $2 billion price tag. Now comes word that you’re ready to sell out to Yahoo, but only for $1 billion. Come on, guys, you’re leaving that other billion on the proverbial table! Never mind that you’re only pulling in $100 million in advertising as you struggle to figure out how to monetize your traffic...don’t sell yourself short. After all, you’ve got a hastily arranged ad deal with Microsoft to pump you up, even if it’s worth less than a quarter of what MySpace got from Google. Or is this all just a part of the game, designed to kick off a frenetic bidding war, or to create buzz for an IPO? After all, the WSJ says you’re considering “following the example of Google… [which] became a publicly traded juggernaut with a market capitalization of $120 billion.” Of course, Google actually did figure out how to monetize its traffic pretty well, but who’s counting?