Allen Stern of Centernetworks has a post up about how to get rich — theoretically at least — by coming up with a popular Facebook app. The numbers he has are from Adonomics (formerly Appaholic), an advertising analytics service aimed at Facebook developers, which is owned by a venture fund called Altura (“the first only-Facebook VC”). Adonomics will also guarantee a certain number of installs of your app for a fee.

According to Adonomics, the top Facebook app is FunWall, with 22 million installs and 3.6 million active users — or 16 per cent of the total. It’s not clear how the service defines active users. This app, according to Adonomics, is worth almost $30-million. If you do the math, that works out to about $8 per active user. Where does Adonomics come up with this figure? That’s also not clear. Apponomics is more than a little coy about the methodology behind its calculations.

I’m betting the numbers come from a place in Silicon Valley known as “Thin Air.” Is a Facebook app worth something? Sure it is. But is FunWall in any real sense “worth” $30-million? Maybe in some alternate universe. As an example of how Adonomics does math, the site says that Facebook has 60 million active users and a valuation of $18 billion, which “translates to $300 per active user.” Except that valuation for Facebook is hypothetical, and as a result virtually meaningless. (The script the company uses also likely violates Facebook’s terms of use).

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Partners says there are a number of factors that determine what a Facebook user is worth. Greg Thomson of Toronto has developed a number of apps — including My Aquarium — and says he now has more than 8 million installs. In this video from FacebookCamp, he says an active user is worth about $3 per year. Favourite Peeps was worth 4.5 cents per user, while RockYou says it thinks the average app user could be worth between 30 cents and a dollar.

Hey, I love the Interweb as much as anyone, and how it makes it easy for people who feel they’ve been wronged to take their story to the people, etc. etc., but seriously — why would anyone in their right mind believe Brad Greenspan, who claims to be the rightful founder of MySpace, when he says that other executives conspired to defraud shareholders of $20-billion when they sold the company to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.?

Maybe if Brad had picked a slightly less ridiculous number, like say, $2-billion it would have been easier to buy into his story, which comes complete with detailed accusations against Richard Rosenblatt of Intermix Media — the company that bought another company that later morphed into MySpace, if you remember the tale that freelance writer Trent Lepinski told awhile back (the one that he said he was ready to publish until News Corp. allegedly put some heat on).

Brad’s story is that Rosenblatt and others conspired to keep the real information about MySpace’s phenomenal growth away from shareholders so that they would only think the company was worth half a billion dollars instead of $20-billion, which he keeps saying is the company’s real value, without really providing any coherent argument other than a phenomenal growth rate (and a reference to analysts like Jordan Rohan of RBC). Joe at Techdirt makes the same point.

Oh yes, and he has some totally incriminating emails from Rosenblatt, in which he says he thinks MySpace will be worth $20-billion some day. I guess that proves it then. If I email someone and tell them my house will be worth $8-million some day, can I then sue the guy who bought it because he only paid me $500,000? As my friend Rob likes to say, Brad should put down the bong. Here’s some more background on Brad and his various grievances, and details on why he was forced out of Intermix here.

Didn’t we learn anything from Bubble 1.0? Apparently not — or at least some of us seem to be determined to jump right back into it with both feet, regardless of the consequences. Guys like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook could be forgiven, since they were probably playing on the swingset or learning long division when the first tech bubble came around. But how do you explain someone like RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan?

He apparently thinks that MySpace (which does not have 100 million users after all, as ForeverGeek tells us) could be worth $15-billion in a few years, or at least that’s what he told clients in something ironically called a “research note.”

As Pete Cashmore over at Mashable notes in a post, this estimate of MySpace’s theoretical value is predicated on a whole series of loony assumptions, including the alleged $1-billion value of Facebook and YouTube, multiplied by the market value of Google and the CPM (cost per thousand) ad rate that a premium show such as The Simpsons fetches.

In other words, Mr. Rohan’s argument (if I can even call it that) amounts to what philosopher Jeremy Bentham referred to as “nonsense on stilts.” Take some fictitious number that someone else has plucked out of the ether and multiply it by some other ridiculous number that can’t (or shouldn’t) be extrapolated — yup, that’s quite the “research” note, alright.

I know that getting attention is seen as a good thing in the brokerage business, as my friend Paul Kedrosky points out, but this is ridiculous. And former analyst Henry Blodget, who did his own bit to help inflate the first bubble, isn’t helping with a post that effectively says MySpace might be worth more than Yahoo, or not. Rob Hyndman is similarly unimpressed, as is Duncan Riley.

Now things are starting to get interesting — it looks like we’ve got ourselves a bet on when and how YouTube gets TV networks to play ball. Check the comments on Jason Calacanis’s blog, where he takes issue with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures over YouTube’s ability to “monetize” their traffic (from the Latin for “turn into stock options”). Fred says that he expects a network to license their content for distribution on YouTube “and take a guaranteed CPM or a rev share (maybe both).” And here’s the kicker:

I’ll bet you a sushi dinner of the winners choice in NY or LA that it happens in the next 12 months.

Game on, as we say up north in the world of road-hockey. For what it’s worth, I think Jason makes some good points (although I would deny that if called to testify in court), since they are pretty much the same points I made in my comment on Fred’s post. Namely: the CPM Fred uses is likely too high, and so is the proportion of YouTube content that is monetizeable — although I think the one of the cat in the Kleenex box or whatever is hilarious too, don’t get me wrong, and I’m a huge lonelygirl15 fan too, as anyone who reads this blog (yes, I mean you, mom) knows by now.

So who’s right — Jason or Fred? A sushi dinner is riding on the outcome of this historic match-up. Film at 11.

I don’t usually like to take shots at competing media (okay, that’s not really true — I kind of enjoy it), but the piece of “news analysis” over at CNet speculating about the value of YouTube has kind of gotten under my skin. I know it’s tempting to take the money that Sony paid for Grouper and divide it by the number of users and then multiply by YouTube’s user base, because I and many others in the blogosphere did exactly that when the news first came out earlier this week.

But at least TechCrunch threw in some caveats about the ComScore numbers for Grouper, and several other people — including Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy and Rafat Ali at PaidContent — have mentioned that the Sony purchase had little to do with the number of users and everything to do with the company’s peer-to-peer technology. The CNet article has a somewhat skeptical comment from an analyst about whether YouTube is really worth $1-billion, but says nothing about how the figure was arrived at based on the Grouper deal, or why there would be any problem with doing simple multiplication based on dodgy traffic figures.

To make matters worse, the piece dredges up a piece in Business Week from March that said Facebook was looking to get bought for $2-billion — a piece that was also widely criticized for being based on little more than a rumour, and was subsequently denied by two Facebook founders. That’s not much depth from an article that goes under the heading of “news analysis.” It makes the bubblicious piece in Business Week about Kevin Rose of Digg look like investigative journalism (Business Week has also jumped into the YouTube valuation pool).

Oh, and one more thing (I can’t resist): the dollar values that have been paid for other companies do not “beg the question” of how much YouTube is worth. They raise the question — begging the question means something else entirely.