Google, Microsoft And Yahoo- Elite Companies That Tried To Acquire Facebook

By siliconindia | Wednesday, 16 April 2014, 09:20 Hrs

5. Friendster

One among the early bidders for Facebook was Freindster. This social gaming site is based in Kuala Lumpur and had bid for the social networking site when it was not that popular and was just blooming up. The former executive of Freindster Scheinman once told Venture Beat in 2007 that “I found a small company out of Harvard that we came very close to acquiring". "A startup no one had heard of that time, a company named The Facebook" reports Business Insider. The deal didn’t go well between the companies and before the Freindster could make another attempt of offering fund Facebook became popular.

6. Viacom

In 2005, for the first time Viacom offered $75 million to buy the company. But the deal couldn’t happen. Then Viacom again decided to buy Facebook when they found that most of the MTV viewers were spending a lot of time on Facebook. After pursuing the start-up for a while Viacom offered $1.5 billion. The deal was almost about to happen when Facebook demanded higher upfront cash. But Viacom offered $800 million upfront and the rest to payout later. Later even Viacom felt nervous about paying that much upfront cash for a company with small revenues thus the Viacom management decided to turn down the deal.