Wise Startup Blog

College students are addicted to Facebook. A recent example, one student commissioned Michael Arrington for help getting his facebook account:

Dear Michael,

I’m a college student at University of Michigan and Facebook has deactivated my account. I’ve noticed, from reading your blog, you have connections to Facebook’s staff. Can you please forward this email to someone or do something… I just can’t be a college student without Facebook. I did nothing to have my account deactivated… it just happened late Sunday night. I’ve emailed them, but they don’t care.

Steven
xxxx@umich.edu

So, I think we’ve established that Facebook users are pretty die hard — just ask any sorority girl how many times they go on facebook per day…

Now, doing a cursory, completely scientific search on the number of colleges Facebook has: Florida has 75 colleges, and has a little bit more colleges than the average state, so there are probably 2,500 colleges on Facebook, and with an average of 10,000 students per college (my alumnus, UF has 50,000), we are at 2,5000,000.

Say Facebook laid the law down on all of these University Presidents: “If you want your students to be allowed access to facebook, give us $10 per student, per semester.”

2,500,000 x $10 per semester = $25,000,000 per half year or roughly $50,000,000 per year.

This is on top of ad deals, and all sorts of benefits the Universities will want like featuring their college, showcasing their achievements, etc.