Facebook is moving into the corporate world with a limited beta of 10 companies. Facebook revenues are estimated at $1M per week, or about $50M. MySpace is believed to be in the $200M range for this year. InsideFacebook believes the 10 companies in the beta are: Accenture, Amazon, Apple, EA, Gap, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Pepsi, PWC and Teach for America.
Facebook is falling way behind MySpace in terms of members, page views and revenues. Take a look at this chart from Alexa comparing Facebook page views to MySpace. MySpace has about 10X the traffic of Facebook. Rumors have MySpace revenues at $200M versus $50M for Facebook.
NewsCorp paid $580M for MySpace about a year ago. Facebook recently raised another $25M in VC money at a valuation rumored to be around $750M. Wallop was recently spun out of Microsoft, and will probably compete in this space.
Microsoft is included in the beta, presumably because so many existing Facebook users now work at Microsoft. I signed up for a Facebook account and was surprised to see how many Microsoft people were already members. There is no accurate way to count, Facebook search is very crude, but my guess is several hundred, maybe a lot more.
Facebook is still very much a college focused site. The personal profile includes choices like; Single, In a relationship, In an open relationship, Married, Its complicated. It also has a category called Looking For: that includes choices like; Dating, Relationship, Random play, Whatever I can get.
A typical Facebook profile will include a list of "Friends" with pictures, your personal profile information, your interests in; Music, Books, Movies, Television, Quotes, etc. Friends include people in your own network (school) and friends from networks sorted by school.
Facebook will need to change significantly to attract the corporate world. LinkedIn is actually a useful corporate networking tool. Facebook has a long way to go. Or, perhaps Facebook has no intention of being useful to the corporate crowd. Maybe they just want to follow their existing members from college into the work world as a way for them to maintain friendships.
There are concerns about corporate types having access to all these college kids profiles. It will be interesting to see how existing Facebook users react. My guess is there will not be much of a problem. There are only 10 companies involved in the beta, and the vast majority of these users are recent college grads with existing Facebook accounts.
My guess is that Facebook will not catch on with the corporate crowd. But, existing Facebook users will continue to use their accounts when they join the work force, and add their companies to their profiles. Young people change jobs often and these social networks can help them find their next opportunity. LinkedIn is way ahead in terms of useful features for people interested in corporate networking.
source : http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/04/facebook_revenu.html
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