Marketing Pilgrim

The supplied link doesn't include the phrase, but this other article on the same site does: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/05/google-to-departing-employees-… It seems that simply the "Employees:" in the title is enough to feed a Google 'square' with the following text, as if the ":" always indicates a labeled value. (I was especially motivated to look up the origin because I made a similar quip about the employee-retention-analysis here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=617711 .)

If Ford had a $2.5billion[1] advertising program encouraging people to take part in street racing then yes, I might well hold them partly responsible for street racing deaths. Especially if the budget for public health education is tiny. [1] 2007, according to this source (http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/10/what-top-brands-spend-on-adver…

I'm currently find this discussion ignorant and annoying. People are claiming a $3.7 B valuation implies a $10 B exit, and that this is absurd somehow, so therefor the VC's must be stupid. Here's the Math so you can understand the logic. Google claim they can make $10/year from advertising, per user on Android phones[1]. Current speculation is that Facebook is on course to make around $1.6 B from 500 million users this year (ie, $3.2/user/year)[2]. If Google and Facebook can do this, than surely Twitter can make a comparable number - but lets say $2/user/year to be conservative. Twitter has ~150/million users, so they should be able to make around $300M/year. Google's P/E is ~20, but they are a mature company, and Facebook seems to be trading at a P/E of ~50. For out estimates we'll split the difference and give Twitter a P/E of 30. 300M * 30 = $9 Billion. People seem to think that Twitter can't make any money from advertising. In my view, this is a pretty extraordinary claim - everyone else can make money, so why can't Twitter? They actually have a lot of advantages (eg, desktop & mobile installs) that most websites don't have. Many companies pay to be included on toolbars etc that end up on people computers, and yet to here people here talk you'd think having millions of people install your thick client is a…