The One Billion Dollar Question

Photo courtesy of Black College Wire

Will Yahoo buy Facebook in a one billion dollar deal? This is the question that had been raised last week in the economical newspapers.

In the last year we haven’t heard any real news from Yahoo. It seemed as if the number one portal had lost not only its revenues (the company announced on it last week) but also momentum.

Facebook is the growing one. 71% of college students said on July that Facebook is in. The same amount also said that drinking beer is in.

Facebook is a walled garden. The entrance allowed only to college students. MySpace, the largest community website, is an open portal. Everybody can open a page, more than 1B page views per day!!! – Really a monster. Facebook leveraging is in his walled garden. The users feel safe (no perverts, no commercial pages and virtual friends) and exclusive – meaning not everybody can join this club.

What would happen if Yahoo would buy Facebook?

One option – nothing. They will leave Facebook as a property just like they did with Flickr. No real connection to Yahoo.

The other option – Yahoo will make Facebook turn into the community site of Yahoo offering all Yahoo’s registered users the option to build their page on Facebook. The results – no more safety, no more exclusivity. And the real question is MySpace.

During this time, MySpace is aggregating more and more content from it’s parent company (Fox) and becoming the portal. My bet: until Yahoo will end the circle of buying Facebook and connecting it to there product, it won’t be relevant. MySpace will conquer them all.

K.