MARKET
WATCH -- Oct 27 -- Apparently, about 4 million college students across
the country are "facebooking" their classmates, whether to connect with
them or just get more information about them. News Corp and
Viacom have shown interest in meeting with young Mark Zuckerberg, the
21-year-old Harvard dropout who started Facebookin his dorm in February 2004, and came into MarketWatch's San Francisco
TV studios recently for an interview. Zuckerberg started the Facebook -
essentially an online student directory -- while he was a sophomore at
Harvard. The psychology major tells me that it took about 10 days --
during Finals -- for him to build the site. He decided to take a leave
from Harvard his junior year and move to Palo Alto, Calif. In the
fall of 2004
former-PayPal-CEO-turned-hedge-fund-manager-and-angel-investor Peter Thiel-- whose fund is up 60%-plus this year -- gave Zuckerberg $500,000 to
buy servers to support the growing audience base at Facebook. By 2005
Zuckerberg had raised $12.7 million, with Accel Partners leading the VC
funding round with a valuation of about $100 million. Zuckerberg told
me that the fee site is profitable and makes money from advertising
(8.5 million uniques). Users spend more time on Facebook than MySpace.
~70% of the nearly 5 million registered users log on daily. Zuckerburg
met with Chris DeWolfe, MySpace CEO who saw the selling of his company
to a big media company as a natural progression. (I heard the next step for DeWolfe is to launch a MySpace music label with Interscope Records.)
Zuckerberg doesn't agree entirely, stating that technology and
engineering should be considered a big priority at today's media
companies. "What drives the site is an offline dynamic and
culture around it." What he means is that the Facebook communities
revolve around a particular school. He can walk out into the school
grounds and see everyone he knows in the Facebook. If Friendsteris any guide, it's difficult to maintain a lead in this rapidly
changing media business. What happens when the Facebook saturates the 8
million college-student market? FULL ARTICLE @ INVESTORS.COM

Mark Brooks:
As TV struggles to keep it's younger audiences hitched, advertisers
will seek out the likes of Facebook for advertising. This will
become an ever more valuable property as it penetrates the most
valuable segment of the younger demographics; college bound youngsters
and alumni. What irks me is that I worked on hooking up the UC system
with an early version of Plaxo in 2000; 'eturn' was set on becoming a
self updating address book for the masses. Alas, eturn,
Planetall, DigitalMe, Swifttouch and Contact.com all headed south in
the dotcom crash.