TechCrunch estimates that each U.S. social media user is worth $132.
Its methodology: It took total U.S. online advertising spending (PriceWaterhouseCooper) and divided it by the number of U.S. online users (comScore). It then took the number of unique visitors for Facebook, MySpace, etc. and multiplied it by $132 to get a valuation for each company.
Facebook “won” over MySpace. Last year MySpace “won.”
TechCrunch says that “this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who
have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.”
Not sure if I buy this – I will think about whether this is a useful number for news sites…or just a number.
News Numbers 