Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away • Hacker News Board

Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away

#31

Post by rubyrescue » Sun, Dec 02, 2012, 1:36 AM UTC

hosay123 wrote: post #27

travisp wrote: post #18

Earlier 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…

I know a lot of Bloomberg reporters and a bureau chief for a pretty big market and they definitely do not work this way. For starters, the people relying on the terminals (and paying a lot of money for them) are savvier than that.

Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away

#32

Post by hosay123 » Sun, Dec 02, 2012, 1:42 AM UTC

rubyrescue wrote: post #31

hosay123 wrote: post #27

Earlier 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…

I know a lot of Bloomberg reporters and a bureau chief for a pretty big market and they definitely do not work this way. For starters, the people relying on the terminals (and paying a lot of money for them) are savvier than that.

> certain classes of

As commented below, Bloomberg mentions it in his autobiography.

Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away

#33

Post by uvTwitch » Sun, Dec 02, 2012, 3:09 AM UTC

jasonkolb wrote: post #2

Facebook will be able to buy them for the price of a taco soon.

the taco would be a better investment.

Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away

#34

Post by macspoofing » Sun, Dec 02, 2012, 4:32 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #24

macspoofing wrote: post #21

Yeah 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.

Facebook changed their platform right underneath them.

Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away

#35

Post by RobAtticus » Sun, Dec 02, 2012, 4:59 AM UTC

jorts wrote: post #30

zaidf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably a long shot, but should online gaming ever come back to the US (and perhaps this will work in other markets), maybe Zynga can position themselves as the choice for casual gambler. If they can convert a bunch of their Farmville, etc users into playing poker, it could make for some very soft games. I don't think you'll see them as the place to be for serious players who want high limits or lots of different tournaments/options, but something that even the most casual of poker players/gamblers can be very lucrative (as well as draw in low/mid limit sharks who want easy cash). This all depends on the premise that the friction from being a player of one Zynga game to being a gambling player on a Zynga game is less than being a player of a Zynga game and also joining an unrelated gambling site.

Re: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away

#36

Post by xpose2000 » Sun, Dec 02, 2012, 5:29 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #20

jrosenblatt wrote: post #8

Sure, 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.

A one-day stock price decrease isn't the news. Zynga was in a very special place at a very special time. Social gaming had an amazing stretch of months, but that time seems to have passed, at least in terms of being on fire. Zynga's relationship with Facebook is really the only thing that set them apart. Innovative games? They took the same game and kept reskinning it. When that fizzled out, they began copying other…

Well said.

As far as Facebook. This news is great. It gives confidence to investors that they don't need Zynga to do well in terms of revenue. (Although they should have already knew that).