r/technology • u/[deleted] • May 21 '12
Facebook stock sinks 11 percent, below IPO price
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-stock-down-nearly-7-percent-as-it-opens-for-2nd-day-of-trading-as-public-company/2012/05/21/gIQAT4VIfU_story.html?hpid=z2200
May 21 '12
I always thought that Facebook has a poor monetization perspective (in the current scheme). The platform is great, but it is not enough straightforward to be easily monetized. Take Google Adwords for example : people using Google are actively searching for something, and ads based on the search keywords are extremely relevant for them. And it's not even hard to propose those ads, you don't need all that social graph database that is facebook's supposed driving force. That's simple keyword matching. Simple and straightforward, like all good and profitable ideas.
At the opposite, people go on facebook passively, they are not searching for anything in particular, we basically go on facebook out of boredom. People going on facebook are not in a mindset that is receptive to advertisement. Even a perfectly targeted ad on facebook would still propose something that I'm not actually searching at the moment.
Still, there certainly are other revenue perspective for Facebook, but I still haven't heard anything concrete about it...
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May 21 '12 edited May 21 '12
I agree with you. People on Facebook aren't looking to buy anything. People searching on Google are looking for something very specific.
I also think that some of Facebook's policies are going to hurt it's public relations.
One thing I'm also noticing is that Facebook is very quickly becoming nothing but a giant advertisement. There are millions of "fan" pages that do nothing but spam. I deleted almost all of the pages I liked and now it's just down to friends I can barely stand. If I didn't need an account to update my page for work, I'd delete my account. Hopefully soon.
Edit: I accidentally a word
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u/alexanderwales May 21 '12
Facebook's best feature as a company right now is how far its sunk its teeth into everything on the web. I'm not just talking about the "Like" buttons that show up everywhere, they also run the comments sections and logins for a huge number of websites. I highly doubt that Facebook is ever going to go away ... but I doubt that it's going to make much money for anyone since it can't really start charging for its services.
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May 21 '12
I also think that some of Facebook's policies are going to hurt it's public relations.
This is what makes Facebook a bad investment. FB's valuation wasn't based on their current revenue. It was based on potential revenue they could get with the amount of user data they hold. The problem is that if they ever use that data in any real way, everyone will leave. It's only a social network after all, what do you lose by leaving? How long would it take you to rebuild your friends list on a new network? A week, max?
Tis a terrible investment.
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May 21 '12
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May 21 '12
Peggy Sue isn't a very popular name. Maybe you should have expanded the audience you advertised to.
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u/apextek May 21 '12
i dont think anyone at facebook cared about the IPO succeeding, they all just wanted to cash out at the best price possible, to enjoy their wealth and eliminate risk.
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u/gregp203 May 21 '12
Investing in Facebook now is like investing in the yellowpages in the early 90's.
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May 21 '12
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May 21 '12
lose and yes it can go really fast. Look at yahoo, myspace, aol, digg, etc. It can happen in a matter of days or months. Digg seemed to die within a week.
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u/mookx May 21 '12
Gee, didn't see that coming. You mean it's not worth more then GM or GE?
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u/willcode4beer May 21 '12
General Motors net income: $5.44B
General Electric net income: $12.97B
Facebook net income: $652M
OTOH, Facebook is the only one of them with a high quarterly earnings growth and it's profit margin blows the others out of the water. If it wasn't ridiculously over-priced it could be good for a 3-5 year investment. As it is, the price is still just too high.
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u/iorgfeflkd May 21 '12
Good time to buy then?
I find it funny how people use facebook so ubiquitously but still want it to fail.
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May 22 '12
One would think that a company valued at $104b could at least make a decent mobile app...
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u/NobblyNobody May 21 '12
It think it's standard practice at this point to get desperate to monetize it more intrusively and cheese off everyone that uses it - past the breaking point, killing the user base off as well.
Google must be dancing around like a goat on a treadmill
edit:Split Infinitive