This is so dumb it's almost offensive. All companies don't peak in their performance at the same time. Look at one seven year old company and another. If their numbers are the same at that moment, what odds would you place on their numbers still being the same (+-10%) ten years later? Me, I don't put much money on that at all.

Of course you can't compare them directly but I thought it was interesting to see the numbers behind Google's valuation.

Based on these numbers, if you think Facebook is overvalued today you sort of have to make the same conclusion about Google in 2004.

In fact, Facebook has even higher profit than Google did when it was valued the same.

In 2003, total internet advertising revenue was 1/3 of 2009's. Also adjust for inflation and look at the picture again.

Well, we're still at the very early stages of social media on the web. As someone else points out in another comment: owning the complete social graph may very well be the most valuable asset ever. I think the potential market for Facebook can grow much more than just 3 times over the next 7 years.

Inflation has been low the last decade, but sure, that affects the numbers.

Social media is a nonexistant. It's something somebody at Facebook (or Twitter) dreamed up to hype and justify existence.

From henceforth I declare this movemenet DuncanIdahia - you may not have heard of us - but we're growing tremendously (we grew infinitely from 5 minutes ago to now).

Whatever.

One of the WSJ staffers who writes for that blog and a lot of their tech pieces, Jessica Vascellaro, dates Sam Lessin. He was in Mark's frat and just sold his company to Facebook.

They should have put a graph of internet users and total on-line ad revenue comparing 2003 and 2010.

Facebook has stated repeatedly that it is focussing on growth, not on monetisation. If they are able to revolutionize banner ads by using the social graph outside of their own territory they might be able to earn even more than google does (imagine the increase of CPM for news, video etc. if everyone is shown ads accordings to their interests). Besides the Internet is still growing fast with the regard to the number of users (especially internationally) and the time of usage (think of smartphones and tablets).

Of course it is possible that they mess it up but the success of Google in 2004 was also far from certain.

With a pe only about 30% - 40% above that of Amazon I don't think that the valuation is that absurd.

Facebook growth is about to end though. Most of the people who could've joined facebook, have done so.

Evidence to support this claim? Facebook has around 600 million active users today, giving them several billion more prospects. Their core product, the graph of human relationships, might very well be the single most valuable business product ever.

Several billion more? There are an estimated 2 billion internet users, and of those not using Facebook, a significant proportion of those are in countries that ban their population from accessing it.

Facebook might have plenty of scope for revenue generation, but their actual number of pageviews and users can't grow much more without them actually being the internet for the average person

There are fewer than 2 billion people with the internet access.

Facebook has 600 million active users, which means they have many more registered users who don't use the service or barely use it.

So in the very best case they can grow to 2 billion active users. And that's if they can magically make every single one of them active.