Monday Note

Exactly three years ago, Charlie Rose interviewed Marc Andreessen, the creator of Netscape and Facebook board member. In his trademark rapid-fire talk, Marc shared his views on Facebook. (Keep the February 2009 context in mind: the social network had 175 million users and Microsoft had just made an investment setting Facebook’s valuation at $15 billion.)

About Mark Zuckerberg’s vision:

The big vision basically is — I mean the way I would articulate it is connect everybody on the planet, right? So I mean [there are] 175 million people on the thing now. Adding a huge number of users every day. 6 billion people on the planet. Probably 3 billion of them with modern electricity and maybe telephones. So maybe the total addressable market today is 3 billion people. 175 million to 3 billion is a big challenge. A big opportunity.

Indeed.
About monetization:

There’s a lot of confusion out there. Facebook is deliberately not taking the kind of normal brand advertising that a lot of Web sites will take. So you go to a company like Yahoo which is another fantastic business and they’ve got these banner ads and brand ads all over the place, Facebook has made a strategic decision not to take a lot of that business in favor of building its own sort of organic business model; and it’s still in the process of doing that and if they crack the code, which I think that thy will, then I think it will be very successful and will be very large. The fallback position is to just take normal advertising. And if Facebook just turned on the spigot for normal advertising today, it’d be doing over a billion dollars in revenue. So it’s much more a matter of long term (…)  It could sell out the homepage and it would start making just a gigantic amount of money. So there’s just tremendous potential and it’s just a question exactly how they choose to exploit it. What’s significant about that is that Mark [Zuckerberg] is very determined to build a long term company.

In another interview last year, commenting on Facebook’s generous cumulated funding ($1.3 billion as of January 2011), Andreessen said the whole amount actually was a shrewd investment as it translated into an acquisition cost of a “one or two dollars per user” ($1.53 to be precise), which sounded perfectly acceptable to him.

Now, take a look at last week’s pre-iPO filing: Marc Andreessen was right both in 2009 and in 2011.

Last year, each of the 845 million active members brought $4.39 in revenue and $1.18 in net income. Even better, based on the $3.9 billion in cash and marketable securities on FB’s balance sheet, each of these users generated a cosy cash input of $1.53 dollars.

How much is the market expected to value each user after the IPO? Based on the projected  $100 billion valuation, each Facebooker would carry a value of $118. Keep this number in mind.

How does it compare with other media and internet properties?

Take LinkedIn: The social network for professionals is fare less glamorous than Facebook, a fact reflected in its members’ valuation. Today, LinkedIn has about 145 millions users, for a $7.7 billion market cap; that’s a value of $57 per user, half a Facebooker. A bit strange considering LinkedIn demographics, in theory much more attractive than Facebook advertising wise. (See a detailed analysis here). Per user and per year, LindkedIn makes $3.5 in revenue and $0.78 in profit.

Let’s now switch to traditional medias. Some, like the New York Times, were put on “deathwatch” by Marc Andreessen three years ago.

Assessing the number of people who interact with NYT brands is quite difficult. For the company’s numerous websites, you have to deal with domestic and global reaches: 43 millions UVs for the Times globally, 60 millions for its guide site About.com, etc. Then, you must take into account print circulation for the NY Times and the Boston Globe, the numbers of readers per physical copy, audience overlaps between businesses, etc.

I’ll throw an approximate figure of 50 million people worldwide who, one way or the other, are in some form of regular contact with one of the NYT’s brands. Based on today’s $1.14 billion market cap, this yields a valuation of $23 per NYT customer, five times less than Facebook. That’s normal, many would say. Except for one fact: In 2011, each NYT customer brought $46 in revenue, almost ten times more than Facebook. As for the profit (a meager $56 million for the NYT), each customer brought a little more than a dollar.

I did the same math with various media companies operating in print, digital, broadcast and TV. Gannett Company, for instance, makes between $50 and $80 per year in revenue  per customer, and, depending on the way you count, the market values that customer at about $50.

Indeed, measured by trends (double digit growth), global reach and hype, Facebook or LinkedIn are flying high while traditional medias are struggling; when Facebook achieves a 47% profit margin, Gannett or News Corp are in the 10% range.

Still. If we pause at today’s snapshot, Facebook economics appear out of touch with reality: each customer brings then times less than legacy media, and the market values that customer up to five times more. And when News Corp gets a P/E of 17, Gannett a P/E of 8, Facebook is preparing to offer shares a multiple of 100 times its earnings and 25 times its revenue. Even by Silicon Valley ambitious standards, market expectation for Facebook seems excessive: Apple is worth 13 times its earnings and Google 20 times.

Facebook remains a stunning achievement: it combines long term vision, remarkable execution, and a ferociously focused founder. But, even with a potential of 3 billion internet-connected people in 2016 vs. 1.6 billion in 2010 (a Boston Consulting Group projection), it seems the market has put Facebook in a dangerous bubble of its own.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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