facebook for sale: $2,000,000,000?

Businessweek is reporting that Facebook is for sale. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale - and Business Week reckons that media company Viacom looks like a good fit. Facebook got around 5.5 Billion page views in February which, although it doesn't quite match MySpace which got 23.5 Billion (second to Yahoo's 30 billion), is still enough to make it the 7th busiest website.

News Corp spent $580 million to buy MySpace in July 2005. Since then we've seen iVillage snapped up earlier this month by NBC for $600 million, and ITV bought UK classmates.com pretender FriendsReunited for around $300 million in December. WikiCities announced a $4million cash injection today, tribe.net keeps getting cash, etribes life in the UK found investors and Gumtree was bought by ebay, flickr (and nearly everything else) by yahoo...the list could go on and on.

So is facebook likely to sell for "as much as $2 billion"? Who knows, it appears to be a sellers market in the social networking business as big name players, and mainstream media, try to play catch-up. It's even got me wondering how much my blog is worth (apparently $0)