How the Estimize Consensus Nailed the Facebook Revenue Print

The Estimize community of analysts, traders, corporate finance professionals and financial peanut gallery people continues to amaze me more and more every day. Our whole crowdsourcing experiment does as well.

But what happened today just takes the cake. Facebook filed its amended S-1 with full accounting for FQ1 2012. In the updated filing, Facebook reports 1.058B in revenue and EPS of 9 cents.

A little more than a month ago we put Facebook up on Estimize, our first private company listing. We had no clue what would happen as there hasn’t been and still isn’t any type of baseline estimate from the sell side. The Estimize community of buy side and independent analysts was all on its own, with no spread to game or baseline scenario to use.

Because of how the site works, we needed to give a Wall Street estimate, so we made one up. We projected 25% YOY revenue and EPS growth. But as the last month went on, we saw the Estimize numbers diverging greatly from this.

And guess what happened. With no guidance what so ever, from the company or the sell side, the Estimize consensus nailed the revenue number, coming in at 1.07B. There were 14 estimates with quite a wide range of opinions, but average together the result was amazing.

Click through the image to see the results.

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