Based on free user created content, selling user profile information and some weird notion that it's going to be an advertising midas, Facebook is valued at $50 to $75b. Following the lemming run, there's now a horde of internet start ups solely being valued on their potential to generate advertising revenue. Yet, the internet continues to suck as an advertising medium. Banner ads average one click in a thousand. Facebook's click through is an anemic .05% and possibly less. And what do internet start ups do in order to build brand and create awareness? They don't advertise on the web, they advertise on the Super Bowl. Talk about faith in the industry.

Hate to burst the bubble, but:

If there is a bubble, then advertising is fueling it, but not as it did 11 years ago. Rather than glitzy ad campaigns pumping stock prices, it's the hope of advertising as a source of revenue that is swelling companies' paper worth. Beneath that hope is the perhaps unconscious belief that the largesse of marketers is infinite, an all-too-convenient forgetting that big advertisers are bureaucratic and increasingly austere when it comes to how they spend. They, and their agencies, are not Medicis for the digital era who want to spend their days funding sociology experiments.