It took about $ 585 million US dollars to develop Google+

This amount was indicated by Forbes expert Bruce Urbin. It is clear that no one gave him any data, all the calculations were made on the basis of purely speculative conclusions. Interestingly, the calculations were not carried out by Bruce himself, but by his good friend, Phil Terry, co-founder of Creative Good. In general, the assessment carried out 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. But let's see what the calculations of Urbin and Terry consisted of.

So, the total cost of the social network was based on the following data:

- 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 technologies of several companies previously purchased by the corporation:

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

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

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

Via blogs.forbes.com