From $1.40/User to the Moon!!!

"Alright, what the heck is he talking about now...?"

Mashable took a look at the quarterly SEC filing of SNAP Interactive, which operates the "Are You Interested" and "Meet New People" facebook application that boast 5.2 million and 335,000 members respectively. From this, and the company's market capitalization, they back out $1.40/user based on the following insights:

"As deals become more common in the Facebook application space, the question becomes how much is a user worth? As a publicly traded company, SNAP is sporting a market value of around $10 million. At its current pace, the company looks to pull in $1.5-$2 million in revenue this year, meaning its price-to-sales ratio is 5:1. If you assume a 5x price-to-sales ratio, that would mean each one of SNAP’s users is actually worth around $1.40 (each user pulls in $0.28/yr, if the company is valued at 5x sales, you arrive a $1.40 per user valuation)."
Interestingly, neither applications, nor Frengo, which we'll discuss in a moment, show up on Comscore's ranking of widget adoption.

Facebook Application	Engaged Widget Viewers (000)	Penetration of Total U.S. Facebook Audience
Total Facebook.com Visitors	33,660	100.0%
Total Facebook Applications	20,649	61.3%
Top Friends (Slide)	6,230	18.5%
Movies (Flixster)	5,199	15.4%
SuperPoke!(Slide)	3,626	10.8%
Compare People	3,503	10.4%
iLike	3,449	10.2%
Super Wall (RockYou!)	3,237	9.6%
Likeness (RockYou!)	2,693	8.0%
Quizzes	2,583	7.7%
FunWall (Slide)	2,107	6.3%
Graffiti	1,647	4.9%

Second Wave of Facebook Apps

Venture Beat reported on Frengo yesterday as part of the "Second Wave" of Facebook applications centered around companies actually attempting to make money. Frengo has 3.2 million users and gets 12-15 million daily page views. The application is a social dating site and allows users to get new hits directly to their mobile phone as well with the option of charging $5.95 to their cell phone bill to receive more recommendations and new friends. Certainly, the web's modus operandi is to first gather users and then to attempt to monetize them, and the widget trend is no exception to this. Companies like Adonomics are also attempting to put out metrics of usage as well as attempt to quantify the cash value of each of the applications.

Mpayy Secure Payments Widget on its Way

Mpayy's secure payments widget is on its way as has been discussed here. The widget will work with any of the Personal accounts that enable free Person-to-Person money transfers or its Mobile Merchant Accounts that empower direct salespeople from eBay to Mary Kay to Avon ladies with a secure electronic payments system directly from their mobile phones. Mpayy's widget is still in testing, but will be syndicated across facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, iGoogle, and others as seen here.



Mpayy continues to look for charities, political campaigns, and non-profits for whom we will process donations for free. Talks continue, but interested parties can feel free to contact me directly.

GOOG Acquisition of DCLK Approved

The Federal Trade Commission approved Google's acquisition of Doubleclick this morning the Associated Press reports. The $3.1 billion deal will substantially enhance Google's position within the online advertising space as Doublick serves a substantial portion of online advertising and the combination will make Google the #1 company in that space.

The decision comes over opposition lodged from a number of organizations including Microsoft, AT&T, Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Groups.

The FTC acted one day after an announcement between Microsoft and and Viacom that could total $500 million over the coming 5 years in which Microsoft will sell Viacom's remnant ad space on properties including MTV, Comedy Central, CBS and others. Microsoft will guarantee Viacom revenues by buying online ad space from Viacom, as well as licensng the company's content for use across the MSN sites.

Viacom's decision to go with a Google competitor is not terribly surprising in light of the company's on-going $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit lodged against Google over YouTube's display of copyrighted material, including the Daily Show, Colbert Report and others. Specifically, Viacom argued that Google was instructing its advertisers to optimize their content to appear on search results pages leading to the pages where Viacom's copyright videos can actually be viewed.

The agreement also provides some rationalization to Microsoft's acquisition of aQuantive, which owns Avenue A/Razorfish and Atlas. Avenue A is web marketing consultancy that recently helped AT&T with its re-branding. Atlas is a software company that is used to serve and track advertising on partner and affiliate sites. Viacom's properties and advertising provide Microsoft with a use for these large new assets.

This is just one of many arenas in which it will continue to be interesting to watch Google and Microsoft face-off.

Black Monday Review

It's been more than a week since the lost blog post. I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving and please excuse the tardiness of this post. We at Mpayy are speeding forward to completion of our site and moving to User Acceptance Testing and our late January 2008 launch.

The Importance of Scalability

One of the beauties of the platform being launched at Mpayy is the application's scalability. Leveraging onto the bank's infrastructure, we are prepared to handle millions of consumers' online transactions simultaneously. Once consumers get a test, they'll be itching for it, and after yesterday's experience shopping on "Cyber Monday", merchants will likely be ready as well.

Our good friends at Internet Retailer reported two stories that caught our eye.

First, Comscore reported ecommerce transaction times that spiked due to volume. "While none of the sites suffered shutdowns, many experienced extended checkout times of up to two minutes." These sites, and the connections to their payment processors slowed signifcantly, and underlines the importance of multiple payment options and the investment in the Checkout processes.

Internet Retailer also reported that 40,000 Yahoo store merchants were unable to process payments yesterday. Here again, one would expect Yahoo to have capacity models out the wazoo so that such an important day of selling was not lost, but this does not seem to have happened.

Internet Retailer quoted Kevin Hickey,

"Kevin Hickey, vice president of marketing at New Stanton, PA-based OnlineStores.com, which operates several sites on the Yahoo Store platform including EnglishTeaStore.com and United-States-Flag.com, says his company lost about $35,000 in expected sales yesterday as it was able to take in only 20% of its usual volume on the phone and in sporadic online orders.

“We’re disappointed that Yahoo wasn’t up to its normal level of reliability yesterday,” Hickey says. “It might spur us into looking into alternate platforms and to have a redundant back-up system for taking orders.” "