[edanm]

I can think of a few things that would make Facebook worth a lot more money. The biggest is the "Instant Personalization" idea.

You say, rightly so, that Google's ads are more targeted than Facebook's, because users show purchasing intent. But Facebook knows a lot more about users overall than Google knows (Google only knows a search term). Right now, this isn't such a big deal, since Facebook isn't really exploiting it. But pretty soon, Instant Personalization will give any site you visit a lot of useful information about you that can help them sell you stuff. This is something companies will pay a lot for.

Let's take a simple example. Let's say I have a friend called "Tom" who has a birthday next week. I visit Amazon's site (just looking for something for myself), but right there on Amazon's front page, I see a huge ad, with a picture of Tom, saying "Tom has a birthday next week. Why not buy him this book from his favorite author?" Obviously this is just a quick first example, but I'm guessing ads like this will drive up sales for Amazon big time. How much would Amazon pay Facebook for making ads like the above possible?