Formative? I'd say mature, and saturated, with more than half...

Formative? I'd say mature, and saturated, with more than half the customers having limited buying power.

Here are the country demographics.

http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/?interval=last-month#chart-intervals

The US, UK and Australia uniformly have about half their population with a facebook page. Close to saturation I would say. UK and US membership base has grown less than 1% over the last 6 months. More than half of all members are from "developing countries" with low buying power.

This IPO seems a perfect example of smart money off-loading to dumb money at peak value. IMO.

I think as soon as the site is changed to reflect the revenue demanded, the fickle teenagers will find something "cooler" and the rest of us will follow them. Currently Facebook are trialing a feature in NZ, whereby you pay $2 to have your updates dominate in your friends' feeds. Very "uncool", IMO, and will be even more "uncool" when all your friends' names are Coke, KFC and McDonalds.

Using Facebooks's IPO metrics of membership numbers multiplied by the buying power of members should mean that HotCopper can go for a $100,000,000 float.