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Category: Entrepreneurs

Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook Worth $1.5 Billion

Mark Zuckerberg’s life thus far is practically a movie script. Maybe someone will make a movie out of it. Who knows?

Here’s the plot. A brilliant kid masterminds a technological event while attending an Ivy League school…like Harvard…and launches it to hugely enthusiastic reviews. Big wigs stake out his dorm, hungry to make his acquaintance. He drops out of college to nurse his baby and change the world as we know it. Just thirty six months in, what began as a networking site for college students has turned into a go-to resource for 19 million registered users, including government employees and Fortune 500 companies. More than 50% of the registered users visit every day. When a misunderstood new feature brought schrieks of protests from roughly 700,000 users, the media jumped to cover the repercussions. However, Facebook emerged unscathed and stronger than ever. Facebook is now the 6th most-trafficked site in the United States according to ComScore Media Metrix, which tracks Internet activity. ComScore also rates it the top photo sharing site on the Internet, with 6,000,000 images uploaded daily. Facebook is starting to compete with Google and other technology giants as a destination for top young engineering talent in the Silicon Valley.

A senior analyst at eMarketer, Debra Aho Williamson, says Facebook is on track to earn about $100 million this year. This is serious money indeed.

There is some serious controversy about whether Mark Zuckerberg is making good decisions about the Internet Giant he created. TechCrunch, a high tech blog, released documents claimed to be a part of an internal valuation of Facebook by Yahoo. These documents forecasted that Facebook would produce revenues of $969 million, with its 48 million users in the year 2010. It was reported that Yahoo offered $1 billion purchase Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and his partners turned the offer down. There was an earlier report of a $750 million offer from Viacom. Facebook, ViaCom and Yahoo would not comment on the deal.”It’s all been very interesting,” says Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in a conference room in Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters. His appearance is every bit the geek. He wears a zippered brown sweatshirt, baggy khakis pants and Adidas sandals. He walked into the room eating a bowl of cereal from a paper bowl with a plastic spoon. He still resides in a rented apartment, with a 2 chairs, a table and a mattress on the floor. Mark walks or rides a bicycle to the office every day.

Mark Zuckerberg’s college kid approach supports the doubts of those who see his decision to retain ownership of Facebook as a lapse in judgment. The 2 major Web 2.0 titans have sold out to major corporations in 2 years. MySpace accepted $580 million to join News Corp. and YouTube agreed on a $1.5 billion offer from Google. You could bet any cleaver entrepreneur would leap at a chance to piggyback on those deals.

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg is being greedy…maybe waiting for a more lucrative offer? If so, will that return to haunt him? If its not, what exactly is Mark Zuckerberg’s plan?

Mark replies, “I’m playing a different kind of game. I’m here to build something for the long term. Anything else is a distraction.”

Mark and his comrades, Dustin Moskovitz the cofounder and VP of engineering is 22 years old, Adam D’Angelo, his roommate at Harvard, and CTO is 23 years old, are at the controls of the company and true believers. Their belief: that the collaboration, openness and sharing of information epitomized by social networking can make the world work more efficiently.

You may think they were naive, except that they’re so intelligent and creative and have succeeded in ways most people never do. Starting as a Mickey Mouse operation run out of sublet apartment in Palo Alto, they now own 2 commercial buildings of cool gray offices. They now employ 200 who take pleasure in their competitive wages, complete benefit packages, 3 catered meals a day, free laundry and dry cleaning. They continue to push out improvements to a technological marvelous web site.

For now, the people who fronted Mark Zuckerberg $12.7 million back in the spring of 2005 and the other venture investors whose money and connections have helped Facebook’s explosive growth classify themselves as content. After all the member base has continued to skyrocket, especially since the news of the Yahoo deal. This has significantly increased Facebook’s value. But what happens when those investors start getting antsy about realizing a return on their investment? Would a sale or more likely an IPO be far behind?


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David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard – $100,000 per month

Making money online comes in many flavors. Here are a few examples of average people making money online.

David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard are a couple of 20 year olds from Louisville Kentucky who claim to earn $100,000 a month from their one year old site, Freeweblayouts.net. Their website offers free MySpace profile designs.

Another couple blogged about their home reconstruction and made enough money to help pay the mortgage on their new house. $1000 per month…not bad!

Storming Media LLC owned by Jock Friedly, allows users to download public documents. Jock used the profits from his Web site ads for new online investments.

Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc. – $120,000 per month

Jason Calacanis is considered to be the Joe Pulitzer of the blogging world. Jason is a true media entrepreneur who has created some of the Web’s hottest sites. Jason Calacanis was the co-founder of Weblogs Inc and masterminded top sites like Engadget, Joystiq and Slashfood. In October 2005 Weblogs Inc. was sold to AOL for a reported $25 million. Jason Calacanis moved on to become an “entrepreneur in action” at Sequoia Capital. This came about after a short term where he overhauled and relaunched AOL’s Netscape.com.

Jason Calacanis is not just a businessman…his personal blog is one of the most popular on the Web.

Jason Calacanis was earning over $4,000 a day from Google AdSense before he sold Weblogs Inc to AOL for $25 Million.  Google used Weblogs for a case study because of its impressive performance in the AdSense program.

You can bet Weblogs is earning a lot more than $120,000 a month now with AOL in control.

Joel Comm Earning $24,000 per month

Joel Comm earns approximately $24,000 per month on the Internet. He is genuine get rich quick guru.

Joel wrote the best selling e-book, What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense. The e-book, along with the website that promotes it, has a screen shot of Joel Comm’s AdSense earnings from a single month; 11/19/2005 to 12/15/2005. I’m not sure whether Joel Comm still makes this much from Google. It’s possible he makes even more!

Tim Carter: AskTheBuilder.com Earns $30,000 per month

Tim Carter did such a good job fine-tuning the Google ads on his website that it now makes $30,000 per month, according to the Google case study.

Tim Carter, a licensed master plumber and carpenter with his own radio show, founded “AsktheBuilder.com” in 1995. Tim also makes frequent television appearances. His primary focus has been catering to an avid following of fellow builders on the site.

Tim’s adsense revenues now average $1,400 a day and are still growing. Tim Carter is excited about AdSense: it lets him  focus on content development, and provides him with tools to measure ad performance and make changes to maximize revenues.

“People come to me for help,” says Carter. “They get what they need from my columns and advice – and also from ads delivered by AdSense.”

Dansette