Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

With the recent acquisition of a piece of Facebook by Microsoft (MSFT), everybody's been throwing around the 1.6 percent stake means Facebook is being valued at $15 billion. I suppose if all you did was use the percentage of stake and multiplied that times how much Microsoft paid for the stake, that would be true.

One thing I want to mention though is what Microsoft got with that stake, which makes the stake more valuable than possibly the rest of the company.

Like I mentioned recently, Microsoft gets the right to run ads on the Facebook network outside the U.S. with this deal ... they already had the U.S. rights to do it.

So along with their 1.6 percent stake, and $240 million for it, they get the rest of the world to advertise in on Facebook. That gives them something the rest of those that may invest in the future may not get. That makes the 1.6 percent stake more valuable to me, than someone that may invest later, who may not receive a similar deal that Microsoft got.

While the $15 billion valuation based upon Microsoft's investment is just silly, the investment from Microsoft's viewpoint is very smart. They should get a lot of value, as the search ad space is pretty much been decided, and not much change will happen for a long time - if ever. All that may happen is a percentage here or there may change, but nothing that will make a huge difference in the current makeup of that category.

Display ads on the other hand, as far as the online advertising market, is the category that companies are targeting now, and that's the impetus behind the deal of Microsoft with Facebook. They don't want to allow Google, or someone else to get the big chunk of online real estate that Google has with search advertising.

That's what makes the purchase by Microsoft so valuable and why they were willing to pay that price. Other companies following will have to look at that to measure the price and value Facebook can offer them.