After having their value underestimated by investment firms in the US, Facebook has looked to Russia for its latest investment opportunity. They have arranged a $200 million investment from Russian holding company Digital Sky Technologies.

Where the US firms saw Facebook overvalued at $10 billion the Russian firm see Facebook as a prime candidate to make use of monetization models that are popular with Russian social networking sites. Facebook only ranks as the 59th most popular site in Russia with only 200,000 users.

Digital Sky is the sole investor in vKontakte which is Russia’s most popular social network site. Chief Executive of digital Sky Yuri Milner says that, “vKontake is monetized significantly better than Facebook and we believe that Facebook can be monetized to a much greater extent.”

Facebook plans on using the money only if the company grows faster than expected or wants to add new talent to its workforce. There was said to be a $3 Billion difference in the valuation of Facebook between Facebook executives and US private equity firms.

Posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 11:12 am in Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.