Facebook Offers $85 Million to Aquire Zhanzuo.com

On November 18, Facebook offered $85 million to aquire Zhanzuo.com, a Ciniese social networking site with 7 million users. According to The Times, Jack Zhang and Mark Zuckerberg have been planning the deal but have not accepted it yet, but will be decided at the end of the month. Facebook would get a base from which it can grow so it can soon be the largest online marketplace by user numbers. Zhanzuo ranks in the top 250 sites in China. Alexa and Compete, two major websites, show a big drop in traffic for the site over July and August. But Zhanzuo will find that it has more problems in the future if it is owned by Facebook because the massive drop for the site at once might suggest issues with governmental blocking, the site operates on a .com as opposed to a .cn and there is no explination for the massive and imediate drop in traffic. But the traffic dip might be related to users heading back to school. Certainly other Chinese companies operate on .com's without problems. Zhanzuo would also have to deal with censorship, especially with 7 million users. Given the previous debate over Yahoo in China, it will be even more interesting to see how Facebook deals with it if the takeover is successful.