Is Facebook Worth It?

Facebook is preparing to announce its initial public offering today, valued at more than $100 billion. However, with half the advertising worth of Google, the social network’s assessment of its value may be ambitious.

Google’s advertising accounts for 96% of its revenue while the number is 86% for Facebook’s, according to Business 2 Community’s Larry Kim. B2C compared both companies’ display advertising business.

The strength of Google’s network lies in the fact that it “allows advertisers to place contextual ads on a network of sites across the Internet (including Google properties like YouTube, Blogger and Gmail as well as over 2 million other participating sites), rather than in the search results,” the study noted.

B2C found that Google’s network has a reach of 180 billion ad impressions each month, while Facebook gets 1 trillion page views every month. Google reaches 90% of all users online, while Facebook reaches 51%. Facebook’s advertising click through rate is less than 0.05%, and it doesn’t offer mobile advertising, “retargeting (or remarketing), advertising on partner sites, or keyword-based contextual targeting options for display ads,” while Google covers all those bases.

Kim says that Facebook lags behind Google’s network in every way measurable, and that its IPO strength may not live up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s expectations.