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In addition to explaining at http://blog.adonomics.com why Facebook is worth $100 billion, let me also mention the reasons from A to Z why I’ve been told Facebook can’t possibly be worth $100 billion and briefly refute each of them.

a. It only has $100 million in 2007 Revenues — Google only had $86 million in 2001 revenues before co-opting Overture’s Bid-Based, Cost Per Click advertising system as the perfect monetization vehicle for a search engine site whose goal is to get you to leave the site. Now, Google has a market valuation of $218 billion. The same thing will happen for Facebook when it co-opts a Cost Per Customer Acquired transaction system as its perfect monetization vehicle which is for a site whose goal is to get you to stay on the site.

b. It only has $30 million in 2007 profits — Google only had $6 million in 2001 earnings before learning how to monetize search. Google has 2007 earnings of $4+ billion. Facebook’s cost structure is already paid for with its current, ill-fitting, link-off advertising model and so all almost all future revenue will drop straight to the bottom line.

c. It is yet another flash-in-the-pan social network that will fade like Friendster and Orkut — Yahoo thought the same thing about Google (i.e., search is a commodity feature and not a business and will be replaced by something else). They were wrong and Google has surpassed Yahoo’s value because it became difficult to buy or build a faster, better, easier or cheaper than Google and the Google brand “stuck” in consumer’s minds. Facebook will be the social operating system brand that sticks in consumers’ minds and it will be very difficult to build a faster, better, easier or cheaper social networking experience than Facebook.

d. MySpace is still bigger — yes but about half of their users are either identity/advertising bots or fantasy identities. However, these millions of fake, exhibitionistic avatars are not, in the long run, that interesting to maintain nor fun to interact with when compared to Facebook’s users who are real people with real friends with their real names, faces, birthdates, likes and dislikes showing.

e. Google will crush it — Google’s brand power has only extended into GMail (which is still far behind Yahoo Mail and Microsoft HotMail) and they have failed miserably in video (so they bought YouTube), in VOIP (so they bid for Skype but lost out to eBay), and in hundreds of other Google Lab apps that haven’t broken out to mass market audiences.

f. Open Social will crush it — herding 18 to 50 cats to build a social operating system will inevitably lead to a lowest common denominator set of features, a committee-designed UI and variably extended API that will not be compelling for end users. Imagine if the MP3 player industry tried to standardize on their own version of iTunes and an iPod — it would never be as clean as Apple’s. In addition, the advent of Facebook licensing their Social Networking API to Bebo and others means that every wanna-be social network can now get the secret formula to “the Real Thing” vs. Google’s imitation brand.

g. Users will hate it when they understand the privacy issues — in reality, Facebook users understand that what they put on Facebook can be seen by their 300 to 500 friends and this doesn’t particularly bother them. This “transparent lifestyle” works because it brings benefits to those who practice it that outweigh any real or perceived negatives. In addition, for those who want more privacy than Facebook’s defaults, all of the necessary privacy settings are there to achieve any level of control as to who sees what about you and your profile. Those who don’t trust these controls can simply not join. However, this represents a tiny minority of the people in the countries where Facebook has been launched.

h. E-mail / Search / Groups / etc. Suck on Facebook — although the Facebook apps mentioned have limits in comparison to their Web 1.0 counterparts, in most cases they also have HUGE benefits. For example, e-mail is limited by the lack of Forwarding, Sorting, Searching and CC’ing, however it benefits from being completely free of SPAM due to Facebook’s role as sherrif enforcing Terms of Service that punish those who would abuse their right to e-mail others. This is an also an example of how having simple, single function apps where every feature is used almost every day is better than having complex, kitchen sink apps that need to find an antidote for their feature bloat.

i. Facebook Apps are Toys for Toddlers — although some people of a certain age and relationship status (e.g., a certain all things digital columnist) don’t need or understand many of the flirtation and courtship apps that are popular on Facebook, they do serve a purpose for millions of Facebook users. In addition, apps like Birthday Calendar and Top Friends have real utility in managing your personal and business relationships with a level of connectedness that was typically reserved for very ambitious sales people and CEO’s who took it upon themselves to learn their customers and competitors’ spouses’ names, childrens’ names, pets’ names and birthdays.

j. People won’t click on ads — the low click-thru on Facebook CPC ads that take the user off of the site is really a testament to the stickiness of Facebook itself. If and when Facebook offers web search (in addition to people, event, group and app search), then click-thru rates will probably approach Google’s for that aspect of the site. In additon, when clicks stay within the site or are made to look like the Facebook newsfeed feature, they enjoy higher click-thru rates than Google’s sponsored links.

k. It’s all college students who won’t buy anything — in every country but the US the demographics of the users matches those of the online population. It is only in the US, where thanks to its 80% to 90% penetration of colleges that the demographics of the users skews to the 18 to 24 year old group. Even this is changing quickly and will continue to grow as the parents, aunts and uncles of high school and college age students begin to understand how useful Facebook is.

l. Business users will stay on LinkedIn — the instant that Facebook finishes their feature for grouping friends by their various types (e.g., school, social, church, business, family, etc.), sites such as LinkedIn will begin to see a mass exodus to Facebook. This may even be accelerated by LinkedIn’s support of OpenSocial which will allow “Exodus Apps” to be written that copy out a user’s profile and connections and migrates them over to Facebook. The reason for this is that Facebook is a site that is visited daily for news and updates whereas LinkedIn is only checked periodically when seeking a new job or business connection.

m. Older people won’t go on Facebook — those older people who loved AOL (and may still be on it) because it is a way of using the web that is shielded from some of its more offensive areas will also love Facebook when they are exposed to it. In addition, older people have children and grandchildren on Facebook that they wish to connect to and Facebook makes this easier than any other system available to them.

n. It hasn’t been localized — this is being fixed but even with its english-only user interface some of the fastest growing countries are places like Turkey and Egypt. This shows the power of Facebook is not the technology or interface but the people that are on the site and once a country tips toward a social network like Facebook, it will be almost as hard to get them to switch as getting the country to change their native language.

o. It has embarrassing photos from my college days — these are easily removed and will soon be easily segregated into areas that will be hard for business collegues and prospective bosses to find. In addition, many in the coming generation are more willing to have who they are be seen by not only their peers but also those who are older (e.g., witness the prevalence of tatoos and piercings in such business settings as high end restaurants, expensive stores and even banks).

p. The Social Graph is a silly term — every revolution needs its buzz word and this one does a fairly good job of describing the fact every person on the planet is connected to one another by a social fabric of friendships and relationships that can be mapped (or graphed) as a series of nodes and lines. Facebook’s goal is to have the most accurate online picture of this social graph and to leverage it by watching the actions of its users and alerting these users’ friends of what they are doing.

q. The management team is full of amateurs — although young, Facebook’s key managers have been parts of major companies before such as AOL, Amazon, etc. and their board includes the founder of PayPal (i.e., Peter Theil who beat an incumbent giant as they tried to launch a competitive payment system, executed an IPO for an initial liquidity event and then grew so threatening they forced eBay to purchase them at a post IPO premium). To date, the Facebook team has grown the company from 3 users to 60 million and from a $10 million valuation to $15+ billion valuation. All in all, not bad for a “bunch of amateurs.” Matt Cohler, Dustin Moskovitz, Adam D’Angelo, Chamath Palihapitiya,Owen Van Atta, Gideon Yu, Dave Morin, Ami Vora, Dave Fetterman have the right stuff and it shows as their their rocket ship has not only achieved escape velocity but is also more than half way to infinity and beyond.

r. Mark Zuckerberg is too young/arrogant/stupid/nervous on stage/insensitive — the same thing was said in just about every first press article about Bill Gates — the other Harvard drop-out that started an OS company with his former roommate. Mark has actually retained a level of humility that is admirable for someone so young with so much early success. I credit this to his parents and to him having his sister in the company to remind him and others about exactly how he was as an awkward youngster.

s. Facebook doesn’t care about their users — it is clear that Facebook is willing to push the envelope WRT features such as the newsfeed and beacon that its users either don’t initially understand or fully appreciate. However, Facebook is also fanatical about creating a safe platform where people are who they say they are (unlike MySpace) and which is family-friendly and where SPAM and phishing scams and data scraping efforts are essentially impossible.

t. The web should be open — As Dave McClure says, “open is not better, better is better.” The advantage of a walled garden with a strictly enforced Terms of Service is that those who would abuse the trust built into the system can be kicked out. This makes it better for those who choose to participate in an environment that works well for them. Most of those crying for Facebook to open up their bag of crown jewels are competitors who would never think of doing the same thing with their most highly prized assets.

u. Facebook is just AOL warmed-over — AOL was well-liked (even loved) by many users for what it offered with 10’s of millions paying a monthly fee just for the right to use it (even after the web became free) and unlike AOL which tried to keep their users from discovering the real web, Facebook’s users know all about the real web and are choosing to spend more and more time inside of Facebook because this is where their friends are. Just like that bar in Boston, Facebook is the place “where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.”

v. Everyone in Brazil uses Orkut and everyone in the Phillipines uses Friendster — this just shows the stickiness of even a less than fully capable social network when an entire country standardizes on it. This loyalty and tipping-point style of dominance is what Facebook is enjoying in almost all of the countries where there are large economies. As I’ve said, getting a country to change its dominant social network is like convincing it to change its native language — it just won’t happen because everyone has to change on the same day to make it work.

w. Google / Yahoo can simply turn their e-mail systems into social networks — no they can’t because they don’t have their users’ permission to do so. In Facebook, if I add a friend I know that my whole network of friends will see this. However, if I add a GMail address, this can’t be shared with the rest of my address book and it is not even clear how one member in my address book, known only via an e-mail, would be recognized by someone else (e.g., “DM2007@aol.com just became friends with NiceGirl05@gmail.com” is much less useful than “Danna Lorenzen just married Kevin Holmes”).

x. Google owns web search forever — while the term Google currently equals Search in most users’ minds, the Facebook Search box is a wedge in this tight coupling the desire to search for something and going to the Google.com home page. The thin end of Facebook’s search wedge comes from the People/Event/Group Searches that are now performed more efficiently at Facebook. When users fully adopt Facebook as their gateway to the web, and Facebook offers web search (powered by Microsoft), then many users will opt for the most convenient Search box which will be inside of Facebook.

y. Microsoft’s investment doesn’t matter — given all of the software wars that Microsoft has won (e.g., Character OS, Graphical OS, Development Environment, Word Processing, SpreadSheet, Presentation, Database, Browser, Server, etc.), it is a mistake to dismiss them when they pick an ally in the Social Operating Systems war. Steve Ballmer likes to win and he has a 30 year track record as a winner — don’t underestimate the 3D chess match he and Bill are playing to beat Google using Facebook.

z. It can’t be worth $100 billion because it is actually worth more than $100 billion — okay, you got me. I can’t refute this one.

Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures LLC — the first facebook-only VC

(c) 2007 - 2008 Altura Ventures LLC.