Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Facebook Taking Over the World

Google: $187B market cap.
Amazon: $55B market cap.
Yahoo: $22.5B market cap.
Facebook: $14B market cap in SecondMarket
Twitter: ~$1B post-money.


But this chart, which shows the worldwide search volume for facebook vs. yahoo vs. google vs. amazon vs. twitter boggles my mind.



And here you can see it for just the US:


Granted, each of these sites have extremely different business models (or in Twitter's case... no proven business model), and as @adrian_h rightly points out, this graph’s Google data is skewed because most people don’t use Google to search for Google. But if we look at traffic (in this case, Compete’s traffic data), it sheds a little more color on the impending Google vs Facebook cage match:

According to Compete, Facebook has grown its US traffic 77% in the past year (Dec 09 over Dec 08) while Google grew traffic 5%. In Q4 2009 alone, Facebook grew 6.1% whereas Google’s traffic declined (0.4%).

Looking at these graphs, I can't help but think that DST's $10b valuation was a steal. I know I would be a buyer, even at the alleged SecondMarket value (if only I was an accredited investor).

The question of course is how well Facebook will be able to monetize. Google invented one of the simplest and most effective moneymakers out there. They have one revenue stream with ridiculous operating margins that generates the vast majority of its revenues. As far as I know, Facebook doesn't have one truly dominant revenue stream yet. That said, I believe Facebook is becoming a more entrenched part of our online lives than Google. As Facebook Connect log-ins become increasingly ubiquitous, will Facebook displace Google as the most valuable internet property?

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