Mahaney: Facebook Is Google 10 Years Ago

Mark Mahaney, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, was a guest on CNBC's Squawk On The Streetto offer his opinion on Facebook Inc FB's impressive earnings results. Mahaney noted that a shift of TV budget spend is only beginning to migrate to online players, such as Facebook. "One of the most common terms that came up on [Facebook's] earnings call last night was video," Mahaney said. Facebook stated in its earnings that its video advertisements are garnering 100 million views per day. Mahaney added that management's commentary supports a thesis that "we are seeing a shift of the largest bucket of TV ad dollars coming over [to digital sources] and Facebook is a beneficiary." When asked if there exists a company that is able to generate revenue growth at a similar scale that Facebook demonstrated, Mahaney answered that one such company exists - Alphabet Inc GOOG's Google but back in 2006-2007. "There is no other internet company with this kind of growth profile and this kind of margin profitability profile," the analyst argued. "And you really have to go back to that point [2006-2007] which is one of the reasons at a high level you can see the market cap of Facebook getting higher and getting bigger and over time reaching Google's level." As of Thursday afternoon, Facebook's market cap was $266.8 billion while Alphabet's was $486 billion.