Fred Wilson started a great conversation on FaceBook — They’ve got 15MM uniques per month and let’s say, following Fred’s logic, they will be doing 10B page views per month. At a $1CPM (again following Fred’s logic), that would mean they would be doing about $10MM a month or roughly $0.75/user/per month or a little over $9/user/year in revenue. Fred gets to about $500MM in revenues by making some assumptions about increasing the user base by opening up the registration to non-college, non-highschool kids.

But I think the real upside here is on the value of those users — I don’t know the stats on high school vs. college — but you have an incredibly valuable demographic that should be able to be monetized heck of a lot more than $9/user/year. Remember (I started college in 1984) all the free stuff you got during Freshman orientation — all those brands trying to get you at exactly the right time ( I think it was Gillette Atra for me). I have got to believe between CPG companies, financial services businesses, media brands, this is an incredibly attractive demo. Plus throw in Facebook’s ability to target — bundling a package of top colleges, or top high schools, or maybe even top students — and you start thinking that an annuity of $9/user/year is too low.

Another way to think about it lifetime value per user — a $1B valuation implies you are paying lifetime value of a little over $67 for each user of FaceBook. That means you think the present value of all free cash flow you can generate from each user is $67 –(didn’t MySpace sell for $38 a user? A little help?) that number just strikes me as fair, again given this incredibly attractive segment.

I understand the risks of users abandoning the service (see Geocities, see TheGlobe) - but if you can get your heads around that being mitigated — and alma mater affiliation is one of the strongest affiliations out there– it strikes me that with good execution a buyer can drive a lot of value from a purchase price of $1B (see MySpace). The other point is what other alternatives are there to reach this massive, attractive audience.

Check out BuzzTracker Facebook for the latest blogosphere roundup.

Om Malik is calling it Silly-con Valley — what are your thoughts on it?

For me, these two deals between RealClearPolitics and Time and Fox (featured on PaidContent.org today) are part of a much larger story that I think has been overlooked for the most part: the mainstream media recognition and acceptance that in order to succeed in Web 2.0, you need to provide your readers with value-add to what surely will be further surfing on the internet.

This is a big deal — web 1.0 was about taking existing media business models and just making them electronic — as recently as a year ago I had a conversation with a top 10 newspaper GM who asked me, “why would I want to to link to anyone else’s site? I want people to stay on my site!” And the old way of doing business was I own my editors, I own my writers, and I want you to stay here!

I think what we’re seeing now is a slew of mainstream media organizations recognizing that a) people will surf to other sites whether you like it or not b) you have an opportunity as a brand to add more value to the experience if you can provide further filtering and help to these readers and c) if you don’t do it, your competitors will.
What’s cool about these two deals is how the mainstream media companies are actually using RealClearPolitics as an intelligent filter. In Time.com’s instance, Time is pursuing a very smart strategy of shining light on a collection of other blogs that augment their existing content, in addition to having some of their existing writers write blogs. In addition to RealClearPolitics, there is www.andrewsullivan.com, Mike Allen has a blog, etc.

In FoxNews.com’s instance, the FoxNews and RealClearPolitics (and ParticipateMedia) have worked together to create Opinion BuzzTracker that leverages the wisdom of the crowds of the top (think head of the tail) political blogs to determine the “most” important story of the day in politics.

In both cases, this is much more than a simple “click here to see related stories” feature — but rather these organizations putting their editorial footprint on a larger browsing experience.

And one of the points of BuzzTracker is that it is more than a completely automated service — there is editorial control on blog sources, search parameters, etc. that allows us to provide what we consider to be an intelligent filter for the blogososphere on those topics.

What do you think?

Last Thursday, RealClearPolitics.com announced a new partnership with FoxNews, whereby RealClearPolitics Opinion BuzzTracker is now hosted on a co-branded page on Fox News, here.

Today, RealClearPolitics announced a partnership with Time, Inc., whereby the RealClearPolitics Blog is hosted on a co-branded page with Time, Inc., here.

Howard Wolinsky of the Chicago Sun-Times covered both deals here.
We’re very excited about these deals for three reasons:

1) We get to expose our content to the much larger audiences reading both Time.com and FoxNews.com

2) We have extensive link backs to RCP in both hosted pages and hope to gain new readers to our other content as a result of these deals.

3) Both FoxNews.com and Time.com can monetize the pages significantly better than we can, given their ad sales forces and their aggregate reach.

So if you go back to our first principles of being a Publisher, we believe these deals will help us move each of the three levers: increasing net unique visitors and page views by trading in traffic to each of those pages in return for link back and increased SEO; and increasing RPM per page.

We’re also happy to see the BuzzTracker technology that we developed being valued by a mainstream media site — at BuzzTracker we’re tracking over 200 granular topics and growing. Check it out.
Your thoughts?