About $ 585 million US dollars spent on Google+ development

This amount was indicated by the expert from Forbes Bruce Urbin. It is clear that no one gave him any data; all calculations were made on the basis of purely speculative conclusions. Interestingly, the calculations were carried out not by Bruce himself, but by his good friend Phil Terry, co-founder of Creative Good. In general, the assessment made by these two experts can be quite real. By the way, in 2005, News Corp paid about the same amount for MySpace, about 580 million dollars. But let's see what Urbine and Terry’s calculations were made of.

So, the total cost of a social network was based on the following data:
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- about 500 people participated in the development of Google+;
- for their work, each of the developers received 250 thousand (for the entire development period). That is, it turns out about 125 million dollars.

In addition, Google+ was developed based on the technology of several companies purchased by the corporation earlier:

- 123 million - purchase On2;
- 158 million - purchase Widevine;
- 179 million - buy Slide;

It turns out about 585 million. Most likely, the amount was a little more, but in general the situation is approximately like this. It is also interesting that the experts, who determined the approximate cost of the Google+ project, do not consider these investments successful, drawing an analogy with the same MySpace social network, which was recently sold for 35 million.

Nevertheless, we can say that Google+ has better chances than MySpace, because if only a tiny fraction of the billions of Google users wish to become a user of a new social network, Google+ will become a very successful project. Of course, users still need to keep. Perhaps, given the unsuccessful experience of Wave and Buzz, the errors of which the corporation will try to avoid, Google will succeed.

Via blogs.forbes.com