Facebook For Sale

As long as we are on the topic of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, the college equivalent of MySpace, has been making noises about being up for sale, as reported in a recent Businessweek article. A comparison of the two sites reveals some interesting stuff. Like this for example:

MySpace sold for $580 million last year... Facebook is looking for about $2 Billion.

Quite a markup. That's more than a 3X increase in the pricetag. So what makes Facebook so much more valuable? Does it have more page views?

No. While there are no definitive statistics available, we can look to companies like Alexa or ComScore to give us some idea. According to ComScore, MySpace gets 4X as many pageturns as Facebook. According to Alexa, it is even more dramatic. Myspace has more than 10X as many pageturns and 6X as many visitors.

So who would be crazy enough to buy Facebook at these inflated prices? Sumner Redstone. Not to be outdone by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, who bought MySpace last year, media mogul Sumner Redstone's Viacom is rumored to be eyeing the bait.

I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens, but if it happens then it will be confirmed: Rupert Murdoch got the deal of the century when he bought Myspace.