Yahoo! To Facebook: Still Too High A Price

Peter Thiel, a shareholder in social network site Facebook, claims that the property is worth $8 billion.

In his wildest dreams.

Barron’s points out that investment bank Needham is beating on Yahoo! (YHOO) for not buying Facebook for well over $1 billion. Needham’s argument is that Facebook has over 21 million registered users and 1.5 billion pageviews a day.

The advertising at Facebook should not give anyone a lot of faith that this is a big business, at least not financially. Ads like Extended Stay Hotels.

Comscore says that Facebook as 16.7 million unique visitors a month. Even better, the site has 24 visits per unique visitor, putting it just behind Yahoo! among all web properties.

Facebook is big with the 17 to 25 year old age group. That is not exactly the most wealthy demographic group, which ought to discount the value of those visitors.

As to value, YouTube went for over $1.6 billion, but it had a larger audience than Facebook. CNET (CNET), which has 30 million unique visitors a month, has a market cap of $1.3 billion. And, its audience is highly qualified and affluent.

The New York Times digital properties have a unique monthly audience of almost 40 million. The market cap of the entire New York Times Company (NYT) is only $3.4 billion. It even includes those worthless big newspapers.

Maybe Facebook is worth $1 billion, maybe less. But more? No way.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.