Ah Ireland.
The Celtic Tiger
Now the Celtic basket case – along wth Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Iceland.. you name it…
Borrow vast sums of money to build houses. Â How could this go wrong?
Real estate prices always go up, right?
And Ireland (Spain! Portugal! Italy! Greece!)
Who wouldn’t want a house there?
Or a shopping center”
Or a whole village?
How could an investment like that go wrong?
In retrospect it all looks pretty obvious.
But not then.
Then it looked as good a tulip bulbs.
Better.
Because you can always live in a house.
Which is something you can’t do with Facebook.
Neither can you eat it (which you could do with tulip bulbs, worst case scenario).
Facebook – you can’t live in it, you can’t eat it, you can’t wear it, you can’t drive it to work.
It is fun, however.
And very popular.
But is popularity a business? Â Or is it another housing bubble?
Facebook has 900 million users. Very impressive.
In 2011 it showed $3.8 billion in revenue and $1.5 billion in profit.
Very reasonable, until you divide them into one another.
Then, not so impressive.
Facebook generates an average of $4.22 from each of its users per year. Â Or just over 1 cent per day per user.
But wait, it’s worse.
We spend cumulatively 700 billion hours per month on Facebook.
Talk about time wasted.
Facebooks gross revenue is $316 million per month.
or…. ready? Â $.0004 per person per hour.
Or… 4/1000th of a dollar per person per hour.
is that even a number?
That’s what Facebook, for its valuation of $100 billion is able to generate from each of us.
As a business, it makes housing estates in Ireland look good.
sort of.
