Will Yahoo pay the rumored $2 Billion that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg is looking for?
According to Jemima Kiss of The Guardian, Yahoo is in talks with Facebook again after Facebook turned down an offer of $1.65 Billion.
The Yahoo Network, despite its search engine critics, is an incredibly successful example of an online destination with die hard loyalty; held together with the glue of messaging, email, Answers, Yahoo News and other social offerings.
Facebook has become the more mature version of the social networking boom caused by MySpace.
Facebook is sleak, quick, simple and fun; kind of like a GMail for social networking.
It’s also the type of network which is professional enough to post a resume on, or even use as a social proof to show one’s inner and outer cyclical connections.
Combined, Facebook would give Yahoo that social network they’ve been shooting for all of this time and a major vehicle for Yahoo’s display, search and contextual advertising. Not to mention another outlet for photo sharing and communications.
Another bonus is that more and more young users are using social networks like MySpace and Facebook for the connections they used to keep via email. As those users mature, visits to webmail services like Yahoo Mail may decline.
If checking email is just as much as an important part of the Internet as search, and Yahoo and Google have both proven that email is a critical part of the web/search/media network structure, then the ability to keep up that trend via a Facebook acquisition of $2 Billion today may be seen as a bargain in 5 years.
Given Facebook’s Jobs Application page and their need for ad sales managers, engineers, attorneys, desktop support, and business development persons; it looks like they may be ready to go at it on their own and just hook up with a company like Yahoo as a search and advertising partner in a similar respect that MySpace did with Google.
Oh yes, and don’t count Google out of the equation. They’ve been known to swoop down and snatch a juicy piece of meat off of Yahoo’s plate.
