Yeah Zynga sucks but this is another cautionary tale of relying on someone else's (web) platform.
Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
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Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#22We should all short Zynga. Zynga has nothing special, no competitive advantage, no intellectual capital, no special sauce to maintain their market share.. and what OTHER social platforms are there for games? Twitter? Google+? "Oh, our plan is to launch poker in the UK!" Um.. ok, and compete with 10000 other companies that had a decade head start and know all about the online poker business. Good luck with that.
Zynga has nothing special, no competitive advantage, no intellectual capital, no special sauce to maintain their market share
You're absolutely right. Sadly their valuation, barely higher than the value of their real estate and cash pile, reflects this.
Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#23We should all short Zynga. Zynga has nothing special, no competitive advantage, no intellectual capital, no special sauce to maintain their market share.. and what OTHER social platforms are there for games? Twitter? Google+? "Oh, our plan is to launch poker in the UK!" Um.. ok, and compete with 10000 other companies that had a decade head start and know all about the online poker business. Good luck with that.
They seem to be doing more or less OK with "nothing special," regardless of what any of thinks of their techniques for doing so. What's to stop them from copying yet another business and surviving on that?
Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#24Yeah Zynga sucks but this is another cautionary tale of relying on someone else's (web) platform.
Not really. Zynga isn't failing because they were screwed by a Facebook policy change or really anything Facebook themselves are doing (unlike, say, Twitter's recent API brouhaha), but because of their business model. AznHisoka in this thread said it better than I can; they have nothing to build a business on.
Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#25It's worth noting that Zynga has diversified revenue streams other than the games themselves: they have a pending Draw Something TV show [1] and physical merchandise [2]. That probably won't be enough to save the company, though. It wouldn't surprise me if Zynga pivots into a Rovio. [1] http://www.tvguide.com/News/CBS-Draw-Something-Pilot-1048932... [2] http://i.imgur.com/OZSZb.jpg
Having friends who have gotten TV game show concepts to the pilot phase, it doesn't pay jack squat unless you achieve Jeopardy! or Wheel Of Fortune level of fame.
Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
the point of the rant is that he was a dick
I feel you, but there's some serious dicks in the open source community as well. It seems the same behaviors somehow have different meaning if they're attached to a company that it's popular to dislike.
See my comment got down voted, and rereading it, I can see why. I wasn't saying that all that everyone in the open source community is a dick, but rather, a person can be a dick no matter who they work for. Nothing intrinsic about who they work for, or whether they're part of the OSS community. However, there seems to be a confirmation bias when it's a company we're predisposed to dislike.
Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#27Sure, ZNGA went down 6% yesterday, to about the same price it was on Wednesday, which is still 15% more than it was a couple weeks earlier. Not sure about Zynga as a company, but it's easy to overreact to the market's reaction to this news.
Even though this is Wired, this is typical of financial reporting: to take a single day of price movements and write whole stories about them, completely ignoring larger price movements or alternative explanations. I've even seen news articles about stock market movements changed after the price swung from negative to positive in the same day... but the article kept the explanation for the price movement essentially…
One of the early innovations of Bloomberg was to totally automate certain classes of news story, driven entirely by data. As you can see from spending any length of time browsing Google Finance, the number of this class of stories in the present day is absolutely huge, from a wide variety of 'news' outlets.
"Top movers! Miners down 0.00001% as fears grow over $calendar->getNextECBAnnouncement()"
What's more terrifying is that Google Finance even syndicates these articles, and that people trade off of them - "informed" traders, buying and selling based on articles that are quite literally generated from sampling noise
Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even though this is Wired, this is typical of financial reporting: to take a single day of price movements and write whole stories about them, completely ignoring larger price movements or alternative explanations. I've even seen news articles about stock market movements changed after the price swung from negative to positive in the same day... but the article kept the explanation for the price movement essentially…
One of the early innovations of Bloomberg was to totally automate certain classes of news story, driven entirely by data. As you can see from spending any length of time browsing Google Finance, the number of this class of stories in the present day is absolutely huge, from a wide variety of 'news' outlets. "Top movers! Miners down 0.00001% as fears grow over $calendar->getNextECBAnnouncement()" What's more terrifyin…
Do you have a reference for this? As someone with a Bloomberg terminal I've found their wire service completely free of that kind of junk more typical of tech journalism, MarketWatch, or StockTwits.
Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the early innovations of Bloomberg was to totally automate certain classes of news story, driven entirely by data. As you can see from spending any length of time browsing Google Finance, the number of this class of stories in the present day is absolutely huge, from a wide variety of 'news' outlets. "Top movers! Miners down 0.00001% as fears grow over $calendar->getNextECBAnnouncement()" What's more terrifyin…
Do you have a reference for this? As someone with a Bloomberg terminal I've found their wire service completely free of that kind of junk more typical of tech journalism, MarketWatch, or StockTwits.
Bloomberg mentions it in his autobiography (Bloomberg by Bloomberg) while Taleb mentions encountering similar stories on his Bloomberg terminal in Fooled by Randomness.
Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
#30We should all short Zynga. Zynga has nothing special, no competitive advantage, no intellectual capital, no special sauce to maintain their market share.. and what OTHER social platforms are there for games? Twitter? Google+? "Oh, our plan is to launch poker in the UK!" Um.. ok, and compete with 10000 other companies that had a decade head start and know all about the online poker business. Good luck with that.
Oh, our plan is to launch poker in the UK!" Um.. ok, and compete with 10000 other companies that had a decade head start and know all about the online poker business. Good luck with that. I think your reasoning is perfectly logical and yet, it sounds similar to all the VCs who turned down google back in the day because hey all these other guys had been doing search for years so how can you compete with em? You may ar…
While I don't think the Google Search : Zynga Poker comparison is fair, I think that your comments' parent has a valid point as the online gambling market is pretty saturated. It would be interesting to see if they can do something innovative for the online gambling marketplace.