Facebook now worth $10 billion thanks to Russian firm

Facebook just received a cool $200 million investment from the Russian internet firm, Digital Sky Technologies (DST), which now values the social networking giant at $10 billion.

Despite the rough economic times, Facebook continues to demonstrate ongoing success growing its revenue at 70% year over year. Up to now it has raised approximately $600 million since it was launched back in 2004, led by the $240 million Microsoft investment which granted the firm a 1.6% stake.

The new investment by Digital Sky Technologies, the investment holding company which according to The New York Times, owns stakes in Web companies that account for more than 70% of all page views on the Russian-speaking Internet, represents nearly a 2% stake for the Russian firm.

According to the SFGate, both Yuri Milner (chief executive of DST) and Zuckerberg, spoke of Facebook’s plans to review the ways that social-networking sites in Digital Sky’s portfolio make money from online advertising and selling online gifts, and potentially adopt some of those strategies. Zuckerberg closed by saying, “I’m really looking forward to learning and getting more of an understanding about how these models are working in Europe and Asia”.

Emarketer projects Facebook’s 2009 domestic ad revenue at $230 million and estimates that the company’s revenue overseas will increase 75% more than the previous year.

However, Zuckerberg made very clear that the social network giant was in no need for money, and that the company could perfectly survive until 2010 even without this additional capital.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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