Facebook’s Rates Rise By 100 Percent

Yesterday afternoon, Valleywag gave the world its first look at a Facebook rate card, and we discovered that, in February, the company charged $150,000 per sponsored group.  Now a much more recent rate card has been published – this one’s from June – and Facebook has increased its fee to $300,000.

Facebook’s Rates Rise By 100 PercentThat’s a 100 percent hike over four months – impressive.  Yet it caused Owen Thomas to write, “I’m curious, Internet marketers: Are you really paying these rates?  And is Facebook’s rate increase fair, considering their growing user base?  Or do you feel like Facebook’s trying to exploit its buzz to command higher sponsorship fees?”

The answer to that first query would appear to be “yes”; when working with Facebook’s February rate card, Thomas noted that both Victoria’s Secret and the Dave Matthews Band had sponsored groups during that month, and those groups are still active.

Those last two questions involve judgment calls, and all would-be sponsors will have to answer them on their own.  Still, our own David Utter covered a comScore study that found Facebook experienced a 270 percent rise in visitors between June of 2006 and June of 2007, and this sort of growth is hard to find elsewhere.

As for Facebook’s future, Henry Blodget estimates that, in 2008, the company will earn $750 million in revenue.  By 2009, Blodget expects it’ll earn $1.5 billion.