Las redes sociales como negocio

Therese Poletti, en Market Watch, se pregunta si la compra de la red Bebo por AOL no revela un alcance más realista de este negocio, contrastándolo con la valuación teórica de Facebook (The $850 million all-cash deal was a huge payday for Bebo and its founders, but at the same time, the deal may have placed a lower valuation of Facebook, the darling of social networks, which got its hefty valuation when Microsoft made its investment of $240 million in the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, for a 1.6% stake).
Poletti se pregunta si el crecimiento de las redes sociales no es parte de otra burbuja, con empresas sobrevaluadas. Comparando Bebo y Facebook, las distancias en utilización no reflejan sus valuaciones:

That notion of a lower valuation, said Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner, is based on imperfect data and a range of estimates that Facebook is anywhere from 2.5 to 7 times the size of Bebo. That data varies from monthly visitors to active users to registered users.

For example, Compete.com said Bebo had four million monthly visitors in February, versus 28 million at Facebook, a ratio of one to seven. But active users, as reported by Bebo, are 22 million and 66 million by Facebook, giving Facebook three times the number of users.

"If all things are proportional, it makes Facebook valued at $2 billion to about $6 billion, depending on what you use as a metric," Valdes said. "You could say that Bebo was undervalued or Facebook was overvalued when it was valued at $15 billion. In any case, there is a valuation gap."

Poletti destaca que parece advertirse, en el caso de Facebook, cierto estancamiento en su utilización; implicando en general un pago excesivo por parte de Microsoft por su pequeña participación en la sociedad:

At the same time, there is also a sense that Microsoft's investment in Facebook was at about the time of a peak of what some are calling a Web 2.0 bubble. With the markets now in turmoil and the economy in a decline, investment in startup companies may start to fall off.

Y, finalmente, se pregunta cuánto puede afectar el trato por Bebo-AOL, a otras redes, dedicadas a ámbitos específicos, en general profesionales, como LinkedIn:

It will be interesting to see how the AOL deal affects the value of other social networking companies, especially privately held LinkedIn, which targets business professionals, and niche players, such as ClubMom

Quizá una burbuja pudiera afectar en primer lugar a las redes sociales, y probablemente no tanto a otras dedicadas a actividades profesionales, académicas o de negocios, donde las ventajas de sus servicios son tangibles.