Google forked out $585 million for Google+?

Industry analysts love analyzing stuff – that’s what they’re paid to do anyways, right?  Bruce Upbin of Forbes whipped out his calculator recently, intending to discover just how much dough Google has put in to get Google+, their social networking attempt, off the ground. His final call? A cool $585 million. According to Upbin, that is nearly what News Corp paid for MySpace back in 2005, which stood at $580 million, although you can say that Google forked out less because of inflation.

How did this estimated figure appear? Surely it wasn’t pulled out of the air, but plenty of assumptions are in the equation. We are talking about 500 or so employees working on Google+, where each of them earn around $250K on average, not to mention $125 million in annual labor-related costs and stock-based compensation for the Google+ team. A huge chunk of it also came from using technology and people from three acquisitions – On2, Widevine and Slide, which cost Google $123 million, $158 million and $179 million, respectively. 

What do you think? Is this social network the next best thing to happen to Internet users, or is it going to die out slowly but surely in the long run as something else new comes along to replace it?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Google, Google+