According a Herald Tribune article yesterday, Facebook tried to acquire the German Facebook copycat StudiVZ prior to filing a suit against them. How much were they willing to pay for the company? The price is unknown but based on their previous acquisition price, it was going to be more than $134 million. Unfortunately the offer wasn’t enough for StudiVZ and Facebook turned to alternative measures to try to create an end of the popular German social network.
Should Facebook be forced to go forward with an acquisition? Well, if the acquisition were based on traffic numbers, the company should probably be acquired for almost a tenth the price of Facebook since the site only has around 10 million users currently. That would value the company somewhere around $300 to $400 million based on rumored internal Facebook valuations.
Even though Facebook has a lot of cash $300 to $400 million would drain a large portion of the company’s cash holdings. This means the suit between StudiVZ and Facebook could become a long and drawn out one.
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Apparently Facebook sued StudiVZ too in return, as this website says (German): http://www.mehrblog.net/2008/07/20/studivz-klag…..
Comment by Massfacebooker — August 9, 2008 @ 1:09 pm
Apparently Facebook sued StudiVZ too in return, as this website says (German): http://www.mehrblog.net/2008/07/20/studivz-klagt-...
Comment by Massfacebooker — August 9, 2008 @ 2:09 pm
I am not sure about this stuff because they can only protect their IP and if they design something the same its really hard! its not a technology its just a layout.
Comment by Facebook Spin — August 10, 2008 @ 5:34 am
I am not sure about this stuff because they can only protect their IP and if they design something the same its really hard! its not a technology its just a layout.
Comment by Facebook Spin — August 10, 2008 @ 8:34 am
You forget the market size of Germany (and which relevance those 'small' 10 million have in a market with ~80-100 million possible targets for the whole country). Germany is a language silo-ed country, meaning that most users like a complete german interface.
If you like to compare how much studivz and their additional offerings for pupils and not students anymore users smash everything else in regard to page impressions and more, take a look at the ivw numbers – they rank consistently as top of germany. Not just in social networks – all over the board.
[ivw numbers are independently counted by tracking pixels and are regarded *the* numbers for the german market, not to be compared with bogus numbers like alexa and co.]
While I do not dispute that StudiVz probably is way more a real clone of FB than many other sites, it is hugely successful even without the API.
For the german market facebook needs to behave *way* more clever than they have in the last few months or buy the competitor.
It is also not to be underestimated how suing StudiVz will make an impression on the users: "First they tried to buy us, now they are suing my beloved social network and now finally they are trying to win me over? Not going to happen".
Even if StudiVz needs to shut down now – I assume users will rather sign up for a new network by the same people than move over to Facebook.
Is the German market lost for FB? Not at all. It just takes more than the "oh we are the greatest and allow you to join and worship us" attitude they have shown so far.
Comment by Nicole Simon — August 10, 2008 @ 11:57 pm
You forget the market size of Germany (and which relevance those 'small' 10 million have in a market with ~80-100 million possible targets for the whole country). Germany is a language silo-ed country, meaning that most users like a complete german interface.
If you like to compare how much studivz and their additional offerings for pupils and not students anymore users smash everything else in regard to page impressions and more, take a look at the ivw numbers – they rank consistently as top of germany. Not just in social networks – all over the board.
[ivw numbers are independently counted by tracking pixels and are regarded *the* numbers for the german market, not to be compared with bogus numbers like alexa and co.]
While I do not dispute that StudiVz probably is way more a real clone of FB than many other sites, it is hugely successful even without the API.
For the german market facebook needs to behave *way* more clever than they have in the last few months or buy the competitor.
It is also not to be underestimated how suing StudiVz will make an impression on the users: “First they tried to buy us, now they are suing my beloved social network and now finally they are trying to win me over? Not going to happen”.
Even if StudiVz needs to shut down now – I assume users will rather sign up for a new network by the same people than move over to Facebook.
Is the German market lost for FB? Not at all. It just takes more than the “oh we are the greatest and allow you to join and worship us” attitude they have shown so far.
Comment by Nicole Simon — August 11, 2008 @ 2:57 am
Being German and spending quiet a big share of my time there and having many people there, I think that Facebook is performing much better there than is suggested by German and international media.
Facebook is *way* increasing its userbase especially among *hip*, urban, affluent, young people, which are the main adverrtising target. Most of my German friends do have fb and all those who have both facebook and studivz do in fact prefer facebook over studivz.
A problem though is that the German translation of Facebook is in very bad German, maybe due to the language's complexity and that apps arent translated at all.
Comment by Massfacebooker — August 12, 2008 @ 12:41 pm
Being German and spending quiet a big share of my time there and having many people there, I think that Facebook is performing much better there than is suggested by German and international media.
Facebook is *way* increasing its userbase especially among *hip*, urban, affluent, young people, which are the main adverrtising target. Most of my German friends do have fb and all those who have both facebook and studivz do in fact prefer facebook over studivz.
A problem though is that the German translation of Facebook is in very bad German, maybe due to the language's complexity and that apps arent translated at all.
Comment by Massfacebooker — August 12, 2008 @ 3:41 pm
[...] suggests that Facebook is heavily invested in defeating its German counterpart, StudiVZ, which it previously failed at acquiring. I took a look at the application after reading Eldon’s post and it appears that there is no [...]
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