A Twitter User Is Worth $110; Facebook's $98; LinkedIn's $93

[Forbes.com] What’s an active social-media user worth? You might think the answer would vary widely for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, given their different approaches (and different success levels so far) at monetizing traffic. But you would be wrong. Today’s stock market values each site’s users at surprisingly similar levels of about $100 apiece. In fact, Twitter’s devotees, who generate the least revenue, are currently deemed most valuable, at $110 apiece.

Here’s how the math works. Twitter has a $25.5 billion stock-market capitalization, based on its trading price of about $46.50 late in Thursday’s New York Stock Exchange trading. The company has 232 million active users, so — voila! — each user is being valued at $110.

For Facebook, the numbers are as follows: a market cap of about $117 billion, spread across 1.19 billion active users. That computes to a per-user valuation of slightly more than $98.Here’s how the math works. Twitter has a $25.5 billion stock-market capitalization, based on its trading price of about $46.50 late in Thursday’s New York Stock Exchange trading. The company has 232 million active users, so — voila! — each user is being valued at $110.

And for LinkedIn, pencil in a market capitalization of $24 billion, built atop an active user base of 259 million people. Now we’re talking about a per-user valuation of slightly less than $93.

Those calculations are likely to flabbergast executives at Facebook and LinkedIn, who have spent the better part of a decade coming up with sophisticated ways of monetizing their user engagement. Facebook has become one of the world’s leading digital advertising platforms; LinkedIn collects more than $1 billion a year in revenue by selling enhanced access tools to recruiters and other business users that are willing to pay a lot to comb through its databases.

As for Twitter, it’s early days. The company’s ad revenue is fast growing but small, and the low-graphics, limited screen-space nature of Twitter makes it a far from bountiful place for advertisers to operate. But at this particular moment, just a few hours after Twitter’s very successful initial public offering, investors seem to believe that the most valuable way of connecting with a social media user is via Twitter.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

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