Business Insider
This puts it in the same league as
The two companies were started around the same time. (YouTube founder Steve Chen worked at Facebook for a few months before leaving to do YouTube.)
Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube in 2006 and it seemed sort of insane at the time. In retrospect it was pretty brilliant.
Last year, Citi estimated YouTube would do $3.6 billion in gross revenue, $2.4 billion in net revenue, for 2012. That's much less than Facebook's $5 billion in revenue last year.
Facebook's market cap is $61 billion right now. If YouTube were a standalone property, would it be worth more or less? Should Google spin it out?
The case for Facebook: It's the only social network that matters and it's getting baked into every website and app.
The case for YouTube: It's the most popular video site in the world, and it has a good chance to mature into a disruptive power that could capture some of the revenue we see flowing to cable networks.
Let us know which company you think is more valuable in the comments.