Microsoft takes a small piece of the Facebook cake, for $240 million

Microsoft has finally managed to get its hands on a piece of popular social networking site, Facebook.

A month ago Microsoft announced that it was willing to spend between $300m and $500m on a 5% stake in the multi-billion dollar company. This would have put the value of Facebook at just $10 billion.

The company paid a sum of $240m (£117m ) for a 1.6% stake in the now $15bn (£7.3bn) company who fobbed off offers from Google Inc not too long ago.

Mark Zuckerman, founder of Facebook, has said that it will be at least two years before pubic offering.

With 50 million users per month and an estimated 200,000 joining up every day Facebook is a clearly a popular choice for advertising. Thanks to the deal, Microsoft will have exclusive rights to act as ad seller for the site inside and outside the U.S.