The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.
That may sound like a huge amount of money, especially when you consider that the company was launched just two years ago by a group of sophomores at Harvard University, led by Mark Zuckerberg (see BW Online, "Under 30, On the Cutting Edge"). But already, www.facebook.com has become the seventh-most heavily trafficked site on the Internet, according to market researcher comScore Media Metrix. It racked up 5.5 billion page views during the month of February, the latest month for which complete data are available. That's more page views than the Web sites of Amazon.com (AMZN), Ask.com, or Walt Disney (DIS).
I know several other Memestreamers are working on some cool web apps. Seems that there is a lot of interest in the area. How misguided it may be is a different story, but it looks like there's a crazy money pile at the end of the rainbow.