http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NE22Dj03.html
What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?
By Spengler
“What if Internet stocks aren’t a bubble?” [1] was the title of my inaugural essay in January 2000, with the observation that an economy based on downloading pop music and porn was a possible future state of the world. “Re-ordering the priorities of the world economy around the vices of affluent people is nothing new,” I observed. “We went through all of this before in the 17th century.”
Facebook’s initial public offering May 18 with a $100 billion valuation, to be sure, is not quite as whimsical as the Internet stocks of a dozen years ago, which had losses rather than earnings. Facebook does earn $1 billion a year. Total US advertising expenditures last year were $144 billion according to Kantar Media, and global ad spending was nearly $500 billion. Facebook users provide data which the firm can process in order to target ads to the right recipients, so that the website stands to gain market share, or so the story goes.
It’s Big Brother running the Matrix on Madison Avenue. Supercomputers with artificial intelligence programs will sift our communications for clues as to our commercial proclivities. Auto companies will know when to pitch SUV’s rather than electric vehicles, and purveyors of timeshares in St Helena or shrunken heads will identify the eight dozen individuals in the world most inclined to buy their products. Advertisers will replace expensive broadcast advertising with targeted Internet ads that follow Facebook users from their home page to their favorite websites.