A recent interview with FT.com's (Financial Times) Managing Director Rob Grimshaw opened my eyes to a huge value in Facebook's new Facebook Connect login platform. FT.com's main goal is to maximize revenue from its website (obviously). It can do that through charging paid subscriptions, requiring free user registration, free access or some combination. What FT chooses to do is allow people to see only a few articles for free upon a free registration, then you have to pay to see any more articles.
What this registration requirement does is it allows FT to gather demographic information on its users, and then target ads to them that they are more likely to be interested in; therefore, the ad buyers are willing to pay more on a CPM/CPC/CPA basis. Some advertisers are willing to pay almost $100 on a CPM basis.
What Grimshaw mentions he has tried in the past to get more demographic data on his users, is he has offered more free page views to the non-paying users if they give him more info on themselves.
Where Facebook Connect comes in is this...
Imagine if when you logged into FT.com by using your Facebook data, FT was able to get access to all the data you had volunteered to Facebook. Then FT could target highly specific ads to you and FT.com could generate a heck of a lot more revenue.
So the question is...how much would FT pay to Facebook to get access to your data?
This isn't totally going to get them there, but this is a step in the right direction for Facebook to get back to that $15B valuation.
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