The Piddling $15 Billion Valuation That The Microsoft Deal Looped 'Round Facebook's Neck
Posted by: Jon Fine on October 24, 2007
Is it really that awful for a company as rich as Microsoft to pay $240 million to lock up the ad inventory on Facebook?
This is a serious question. Microsoft gets to lock up ad inventory on the hottest platform going until 2011, and it gets to play with truly the stupid amounts of data that Facebook’s collected from its users. And it gets to experiment with all manner of ad-targeting in a controlled, but very large, environment. All for the price, in Microsoft’s terms, of, I dunno, a really nice dinner.
If you set aside the valuation and just look at what Microsoft paid as a price-of-admission, it doesn’t sound all that crazy to me.
