Google Makes $2 per Unique. Facebook? About 10 cents.
For the uninitiated, a “unique” is a unique visitor in a given time period, usually a month. Companies ensure a visitor is a unique visitor with logins, cookies, and IP addresses, and “unique” counts are generally thought to be pretty accurate. As far as dollars per unique goes, Google is doing something right and Facebook is doing something wrong. Google’s Q2 results show $5.5B in revenue, which averages out to $1.83B per month. Facebook told investors it would reach about $500M in revenue in 2009. That’s about $41.7M per month. Now, Google’s traffic last month was 844M, while Facebook’s was 340M (uniques). Let’s do the math.
Google’s $/visitor = $2.17
Facebook $/visitor = $0.12
That’s about a 17X multiple. Why is this so? Both companies have dirty little secrets. Facebook’s is that people don’t like ads. The click through rate is really low. Google’s secret is that they make all their money from paid search results. I would bet that the click through rate for someone actively searching for “canoes” is about 17x that of someone talking about canoes with their friends.