If Facebook were a publicly traded company, its market value would rival Yahoo’s and be ten times bigger than AOL’s, if demand for its private shares are any indication. Shares of Facebook on private-company stock market SecondMarket are going through the roof right now. This week, Facebook shares traded on SecondMarket passed $50, giving Facebook a total market value of $25 billion, according to sources with access to the market. (SecondMarket itself does not disclose pricing or valuation of the private stocks it trades). In comparison, Yahoo’s market cap on the publicly traded stock market is currently $21 billion, while AOL’s is $2.3 billion.
These aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons because SecondMarket is a private stock market with thinly traded shares where demand often outstrips supply. (By definition, private stock sales trade in an illiquid market). But it is a real market with buyers and sellers, and right now that market is putting a $25 billion value on Facebook. The last time we checked in on how Facebook’s shares were doing on SecondMarket was in January, 2010 when the company was valued at $14 billion (which was up from $11 billion the month before).
Back in August, 2009, DST was buying back common shares at a $6.5 billion valuation, so that’s been an incredible rise in value over the past year. Even Microsoft’s $15 billion valuation (albeit for preferred shares) does not seem so crazy anymore in light of what investors are paying on SecondMarket.
Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, SecondMarket’s chief strategy officer Jeremy Smith explained how the market works to Beet.TV, and that so far a total of about $100 million worth of Facebook stock has been traded through SecondMarket (watch the video).
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
SecondMarket is a reinvented stock market. We provide products and services that enable companies, community banks, student loan issuers and funds to manage liquidity, raise capital and communicate with key stakeholders. A Better Market… We’re empowering entrepreneurs by reinventing the modern stock market and redefining the modern company. We’re enabling companies to manage liquidity, communicate with key stakeholders and raise capital through products that give control to companies, not to Wall Street. We’re changing the market,...
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