Facebooks going public -whats the opinions?

neris

So facebooks announced an IPO and this is the one all the big investment banks have been chasing to do lead bank on. 2 big tech IPOs in the last while (groupon and linkedin) both share prices didnt exactly sky rocket.

My personal feeling is that this one will bomb aswell once the hype dies off. Its got no product and no tanbgiable service offering. I cant see how they pull in so much advertising which seems to be their only revenue generation unlike a firm such as google which now develops operating systems for phones

Also dont forget Bebo & Myspace. Bebo was sold to AOL by its founder for over 800 million before AOL sold it on for 10 million and Skys purchase of Myspace which then went down like the proverbial lead balloon

Some good stuff on the bloomberg site about this IPO aswell

http://go.bloomberg.com/facebook-unleashed/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16830664

Comordha

I believe it is another Fad in the making. It is no Google. Better stocks to invest in such as Apple, who are now bigger than Microsoft and Google combined. Facebook will have maybe 5 good years but can't see anymore than that.

SyntonFenix

Comordha wrote: »

Facebook will have maybe 5 good years but can't see anymore than that.

And you're basing this on what information?

I disagree, 800 million user of Facebook as of Jan 2012. Population of the world is increasing. Users and their offspring will be using Facebook for decades to come. I would say Facebook will have good run far beyond 5 years.

martyoo

Users and their offspring will be using Facebook for decades to come.

That is some statement!

In this business todays success is tomorrows failure. How are they going to justify their valuation and generate loads of profit without pissing off their fickle, ever-changing user base?
And thats all they have, a user base. The rest is just lines of code. It's nothing.

This is not an investment. An estimated $100 billion valuation on $1 billion income and 12% of their revenue last year came from Zynga!

Morgan Stanley, GS and the rest of them will pump this up to the last and then dump it on Joe "should have bought an index tracker" Public.

TheInquisitor

The reason Facebook are doing this now is they are worried. They have stagnated in terms of growth.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com

Between 2010 and 2011 their reach online went from 30 % to 40%.
Over the past 6 months they have not grown at all!
So in terms of going public its either now or never and its possible they left it too late.

They made only 1 billion profit last year when they have 845 million users. Their sales were only 3.7 billion. For controlling so much of the internet I would have expected those figures to be much higher.

I see figures of 100 billion being talked about for the IPO. At current levels of profits it would take 100 years to earn that.

I smell another internet bubble and if it does have an IPO around 100 billion i can see a lot of people being burnt!

Grecco

I think Facebook will eventually come under pressure from Google+
Google are starting to eat into those 800million users by offering a much better experience. On top of this they control the smartphone operating system market and are already top of the pile for cloud based tech
Facebook has already changed and isn't as nice an experience now as it was; there's just too much rubbish and ads
The $100million valuation is mad but what the hell do I know

ChippingSodbury

Maybe I'm too old (>30) so maybe my user habits are different but I use Facebook a little bit. However, any time I login, I do "social" things and don't notice the adverts etc i.e. I'm looking to do things like chat/ shoot the breeze etc. and I'm not looking to buy anything. WHen I use a search engine, by definition, I'm looking for something: it may not always be to buy something but quite often it is and the adverts therefore often become relevant.
I still get the impression that there are thousands of CEOs of small/ medium/ large companies that don't understand the whole social media "thing" and just throw money at it until they discover the next new thing and they will discontinue with the current Facebooks and so forth and move to the nxt revolutionary thing whatever it may be. Adverts are where Facebook need to make their money but there is a finite amount of revenue in the world to be spent and companies will go where they get the best value for money: will this always be Facebook? I don't think so. For the above reasons I won't be investing in Facebook but maybe I just don't get it...

RizzoJR

THE BIGGA THE HYPE

THE BIGGA THE SHORTING OPPURTUNITY!!!

martyoo

THE BIGGA THE HYPE

THE BIGGA THE SHORTING OPPURTUNITY!!!

I'm surprised that no one has created an inverse ETF shorting all these recently IPO'd tech stocks.

shangri la

martyoo wrote: »

I'm surprised that no one has created an inverse ETF shorting all these recently IPO'd tech stocks.

how would that work?

martyoo

how would that work?

Linky

mickman

SyntonFenix wrote: »

And you're basing this on what information?

I disagree, 800 million user of Facebook as of Jan 2012. Population of the world is increasing. Users and their offspring will be using Facebook for decades to come. I would say Facebook will have good run far beyond 5 years.

facebook will be replaced , just like bebo was. They have a huge number of users but these users will just move to the next site when its created and i can assure you that there are genius nerds developing the new one right now!

facebook has no long term product

Soulja boy

mickman wrote: »

facebook will be replaced , just like bebo was. They have a huge number of users but these users will just move to the next site when its created and i can assure you that there are genius nerds developing the new one right now!

facebook has no long term product

You would be surprised about how many people deny that this will happen.
Bebo is only a recent one, there was myspace and livejournal before that.

Marcus_Crassus

I believe Facebook's at its zenith right now. There's only so many people on the planet that can sign up to it. And, as was said, these sort of things come and go, just look at Bebo!!

coylemj

Marcus_Crassus wrote: »

I believe Facebook's at its zenith right now. There's only so many people on the planet that can sign up to it. And, as was said, these sort of things come and go, just look at Bebo!!

+1 There is no independent audit of Facebook's claim as to the number of users they have. As a lapsed Facebook user, they have in the past six months sent me spurious e-mails about messages from friends, telling me to login to check my friends because they've updated their status and so on - obviously acts of desperation to get me to login simply to boost the number of users who logged in last month.

On one occasion they got so desperate that they sent me an e-mail claiming that there was a new message waiting for me so I caved in and logged in and guess what? The 'message' was from Facebook themselves with some update of no relevance to me.

Avoid like the plague. They have clearly peaked, they know it and there is only one way the share price is going to go. Zuckerburg and the early investors will all take a slice of the cash generated by the IPO as happened with Groupon and the mugs who belive the hype will be left holding shares that will plummet in value when the hot air dissipates and this is seen as yet another dotcom bubble.

Thargor

Anything else Id be agreeing with you but Facebook is so integrated in peoples lives now that for a lot of people it is the whole internet, look what happened to Bebo? Facebook happened to Bebo! It crushed it because it was completely superior, same for Orkut and Myspace and now its totally ingrained in too many people for it to die off that easily. God knows what will knock FB off the throne but it will have to be something amazing, Google+ wont do it. Not a FB fanboy or anything, all their 'notifications' go straight to my spam folder, there are days when I forget to look at my account and I wouldn't invest a cent in this IPO but you cant dismiss FB as a fad anymore, theres a chance they could be bigger than Google.

coylemj

Thargor wrote: »

Anything else Id be agreeing with you but Facebook is so integrated in peoples lives now that for a lot of people it is the whole internet, look what happened to Bebo? Facebook happened to Bebo! It crushed it because it was completely superior, same for Orkut and Myspace and now its totally ingrained in too many people for it to die off that easily. God knows what will knock FB off the throne but it will have to be something amazing, Google+ wont do it. Not a FB fanboy or anything, all their 'notifications' go straight to my spam folder, there are days when I forget to look at my account and I wouldn't invest a cent in this IPO but you cant dismiss FB as a fad anymore, theres a chance they could be bigger than Google.

I think you're missing the point a few of the posters here are making which is simply that FB has peaked. I for one am not suggesting that FB is going to go the way of Bebo or MySpace. The problem I have with them as a potential investment is that everyone who is ever going to signup has already done so and a lot of users like me have just gotten fed up looking at pictures of our friend's kids frolicking around the garden or holiday snaps from people in exotic locations and that's even before we start on their ever-changing privacy policy which keeps changing to suit FB and not their users.

The IPO is trying to convince us that FB's revenue is going to grow and grow and I can't see how it will since they aren't going to get any new users any time soon and a lot of exisiting users have stopped using it or aren't logging in as often as they used to so the user activity count is going to go down.

shangri la

It will shoot up in the first 2 days by about 20% due to the average joe wanting to invest and sure they use facebook. It will then plummet. Hard to predict where it will settle but I wouldnt want to own a piece in 5 years.

sizing europe would be a better investment.

mickman

Thargor wrote: »

Anything else Id be agreeing with you but Facebook is so integrated in peoples lives now that for a lot of people it is the whole internet, look what happened to Bebo? Facebook happened to Bebo! It crushed it because it was completely superior, same for Orkut and Myspace and now its totally ingrained in too many people for it to die off that easily. God knows what will knock FB off the throne but it will have to be something amazing, Google+ wont do it. Not a FB fanboy or anything, all their 'notifications' go straight to my spam folder, there are days when I forget to look at my account and I wouldn't invest a cent in this IPO but you cant dismiss FB as a fad anymore, theres a chance they could be bigger than Google.

yes it was superior and the new replacement will be superior again. end of facebook then

Gandalph

I personally wouldn't compare Bebo/Myspace to Facebook, I mean I can remember Bebo only seemed to be popular in Ireland and Australia, I couldn't find any of My U.S. or UK friends on it, and Myspace I'm not entirely sure of but it was never a huge hit over here anyway. FB is so global it would take an absolute monster of a social network to take it down.

I have never used google + so I cannot comment on the experience but if it plays along to the usual standard at that company it could be in the running as a competitor.

I can see were a lot of the opinions in this thread are coming from and can't fault most of them. But when it comes down to the actual stock value I don't think many of us can predict this one, dam tech stocks been so unpredictable!

Fighting Irish

Thargor wrote: »

Anything else Id be agreeing with you but Facebook is so integrated in peoples lives now that for a lot of people it is the whole internet, look what happened to Bebo? Facebook happened to Bebo! It crushed it because it was completely superior, same for Orkut and Myspace and now its totally ingrained in too many people for it to die off that easily. God knows what will knock FB off the throne but it will have to be something amazing, Google+ wont do it. Not a FB fanboy or anything, all their 'notifications' go straight to my spam folder, there are days when I forget to look at my account and I wouldn't invest a cent in this IPO but you cant dismiss FB as a fad anymore, theres a chance they could be bigger than Google.

I was agreeing with eveything you were saying up until......


lol Don't be so stupid

Soulja boy

Gandalph wrote: »

I personally wouldn't compare Bebo/Myspace to Facebook, I mean I can remember Bebo only seemed to be popular in Ireland and Australia, I couldn't find any of My U.S. or UK friends on it, and Myspace I'm not entirely sure of but it was never a huge hit over here anyway. FB is so global it would take an absolute monster of a social network to take it down.

Or a lot of company missteps, with the privacy issues and the general backlash to the timeline, it would only take an escalated issue like that to severely injure their userbase.

Gandalph

Soulja boy wrote: »

Or a lot of company missteps, with the privacy issues and the general backlash to the timeline, it would only take an escalated issue like that to severely injure their userbase.

People will complain about anything, I complained about the last change to the interface but now I cant even remember what it looked like and am comfortable with what it is now. I dont like the look of timeline but most likely I will adapt like everyone else.

As for the privacy issues I have never really seen it as a big deal, but thats just me. I have noticed a vast majority of people complaining about it but its not something I fully understand. I couldn't care less if Mark Zuckerberg (everyone) knew were in the world I was at what time, or if he had a sneaky creep on one of my pictures.

Yakult

The only thing that can take down Facebook is Facebook themselves and I think it will happen at some stage.

Thargor

Fighting Irish wrote: »

I was agreeing with eveything you were saying up until......


lol Don't be so stupid

Its not stupid, nothing stopping Facebook expanding into everything Google do, >90% of Googles revenues comes from advertising and Facebook is the greatest marketing tool ever created, nothing else has persuaded so many people to give up such detailed information about themselves. Advertisers would drop Google overnight if FB got any kind of edge on them which could happen any time, they'll be announcing their billionth user soon. Add to this other potential industries like the gaming side of things which is only going to get more important over time and they definitely haven't peaked.

The Pontiac

Some top retailers close their Facebook stores. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-17/f-commerce-trips-as-gap-to-penney-shut-facebook-stores-retail.html

GetWithIt

This thread gives an example from within the small church that is Boards of an email provider recycling it's old addresses before Facebook disables the account associated with it.

2 (presumably) dead accounts in 2 separate businesses. 1 business chooses to recycle the account to save money. The other retains it forever. Why you would do that and what that says about your business model should be obvious enough.

Thargor

GetWithIt wrote: »

This thread gives an example from within the small church that is Boards of an email provider recycling it's old addresses before Facebook disables the account associated with it.

2 (presumably) dead accounts in 2 separate businesses. 1 business chooses to recycle the account to save money. The other retains it forever. Why you would do that and what that says about your business model should be obvious enough.

Your link is nothing to do with Facebook or its business model, FB did nothing wrong there