Peabody on Facebook

The buzz in the blogosphere today is about whether Microsoft or Google is about to make a big investment in Facebook, valuing the site somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion. The Wall Street Journal's Deal Journal blog looked to Bo Peabody (founder of Tripod, an early homepage-building site acquired by Lycos, and Village Ventures) for some perspective. A snippet:

There are two ways to look at it. There is the purely financial decision, and the other is something different than that. If those guys were doing the risk-adjusted thing, financially they would sell. I just think that the market, if you look at the history of media, it is by nature a consolidating force. Typically things get consolidated. I don’t think that’s a great thing for consumers, but there is serious economy to ad sales. And they haven’t built a real ad sales organization. In order to do that it’s very expensive. Very expensive. Digital ad sales at the entry level are getting multiple six figure salaries. They have to think carefully about that.