Why would stock shares going up hurt Zuckerberg? This would seem to vindicate his strategy, not harm him.
It's that they've gone from abysmal all the way up to the staggering height of piss poor that probably hurts.
Eh. $28 a share is a decent price for stocks, simply speaking. I'm not talking about what it is valued at, just a price that generates capital. If you've got shares trading at $100 or more, you get less people that have the money to invest. (Especially since the default way to buy shares on the market is in 100 share blocs.) But if a stock is trading at $25 a share, then more people are able to buy.
It's dying anyway. Just give it a few years and people will be too annoyed to bother. Also, some kid in some garage is on the next big thing right at this moment. FB will go the way of MySpace
When a share gets too high, they can always split it, i.e. one share is now two, priced at $50 eaach. There is a term for this, but I forgot. Not so sure. My mom and pop are on this now and check it every day. (I am not their friend. ) Most of their friends are on it too. Young people tend to not stick with one thing, but older people tend to not change their habits much, and for my parents, uncles, aunts, and their friends, it seems their habits right now are YouTube, Facebook, and for my mother, Pinterest.
Just to clarify: I actually think this is great news for FB. I'm very positive about FB's future. While I believe that the IPO was overpriced (not THAT surprising considering all the demand for it), I'm convinced there's a lot of upside in FB. Fundamentally, I think Google is the closest comparison to FB so I don't see why FB's market valuation shouldn't catch up in the next few years. And there's plenty of room left between here and a $200 bn valuation.
The difference is that Google's core business, search, is without peers and hands down above the competition (with Bing coming close when you search the English speaking 'net). FB? Not so much. You can communicate with people in a myriad of other ways - without being harassed by Farmville, clicky here, SHARE THIS NOW OR THE WORLD COLLAPSES!!11!!!, allow my data to be shared with god knows who and stuff.
I agree but I will say Google is under assault. By the Germans right now in fact. They could be seriously hurt financially if Germany and then others start this crazy thing that Google has to pay a company if it provides a link to media content (newspaper articles or photographs) during a search to that company.
I think every individual investor who sunk money into inflated piece of shit should lose every penny they have. It's a great opportunity to clear the market of uneducated investors.
The problem being, even if it's a shit investment, and people know this, they'll still buy it if they can sell it to the next sucker for +1. The guy left holding it at the end is the schmuck. Everyone else makes money.
It's called the Greater Fool Theory and it is responsible for a large part of the size of our stock market.
Google won't pay. They simply remove media outlets from their news service when cadged for money. The smarter papers spend time SEO'ing their contents. The dumber ones still act as if that internet thing was just a fad that'll just go away in a year. I'm sure they will do better without Google's 100 billion searches per month
You could say the same for FB at the moment. In terms of personal social networking it's unrivalled at the moment. Forget about MySpace or anybody else. Given the scale FB has at the moment, it's almost impossible to replace (1bn+ members - you enjoy so many network effects, it's crazy). That's why it's even replacing the likes of Orkut in outlier markets like Brazil. I actually think FB is doing a pretty reasonable job in terms of exploiting personal information at the moment. I haven't seen a Farmville message in my news feed for a long time and I'm smart enough to properly set my privacy features so I don't get fucked. However, all of that is pretty irrelevant. You and me aren't who matter here. Just like we don't matter for Google. I don't think I've ever generated a single $ for Google and I'm a pretty heavy user. I just surf with Ad-Block on. The relevant consumers are less savvy and care less about ads. You have a shit ton of trends that FB should and can exploit (move to mobile, for example). I heard about a bank who's now experimenting with FB as a channel (completely separate from both mobile and online banking) because there are young people who use almost only FB. The potential for FB is huge. They can be a bank, a telco, a university, ... you name it. That's why I think they can and might catch up to Google.
From what I hear, activity on FB is diminishing among my friends. While there was tons of 'personal' content a year ago or so, it's mostly the reposting of stupid pictures and 'wise' sayings from idiotic groups these days. Yea, thanks, my teenage friends, for telling me how to live and love and why everything sucks anyway. Please try without misspelling words next time, thank you very much. While I have no personal profile, I do care for my company's FB Page. Since we work with old people exclusively, it's mostly a precautionary measure for the press and a few scattered family members. It's not very active. Yet whenever I work on the Page I do wonder: will it be relevant one day? Will FB survive until the current generation is old enough for our services or are we doing it for nothing and should scout for what's coming next? We're talking at least three to four decades here...
Facebook is not only ubiquitous across the internet, but has been quickly adopted by the baby boomer crowd, and Generation X. In a few years, it will still be here and likely as strong as ever.
Indeed. They are finding ways to monetize, especially in the mobile market and investors like that. But the price is to annoy the product (that's you) even more. Again, there are precedents. Lycos, Altavista, MySpace, Real just to name a few. All once believed to be unsinkable ships. All just a shadow of their former selves. It's just how capitalism works
I've been doing some Facebook advertising for a project over the past few months. When used correctly, it's a great tool that actually won't annoy end users that much -- if advertisers are using the platform smartly, I'm likely to see primarily ads that I'm interested in. (And when they're not relevant to me, Facebook offers me a way to flag them as irrelevant, meaning that the advertiser no longer has to waste any more money trying to reach someone who won't ever be a customer.) The problem is that advertiser support and education is practically nonexistent. To learn how to advertise on Facebook, you basically have to go to third-party bloggers who have figured it out by trial and error; Facebook changes things often enough that information gets out of date quickly; and most of the really useful functions are buried in the "Power Editor," which only works in certain browsers and doesn't have the most intuitive interface. Poor support --> Advertisers who don't know what they're doing --> More annoyance for the end user and poorer results for the advertiser.
As it is I rarely even go these days, they just keep loading more and more shit in it until I've had enough of my antiquated systems not even loading the damned page. It's pretty annoying. I will get in eventually to like my birthday wishes though.
Forbin Facebook? Never heard of it. /Forbin I hate it. Hate it with a passion. Annoying and clunky to use.
