Question: what is the point of Facebook?
Answer: monetizing friendships
Why I'm not buying Facebook
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you ACTUALLY use FB? Yes. It probably helps that my family, and my wife's family, are all several thousand miles away and we just had our first child. We spend a lot of time on both FB and Skype, keeping everyone up to date.
so why FB and not Twitter, for example? Is it the simplicity of having your photo album and messaging under the same platform?
Integration of photos, videos and messaging is definitely useful, as is the fact that all of our relatives have actually heard of facebook as opposed to twitter ;)
I guess the other consideration is that facebook at least has some semblance of privacy, which is reassuring when posting photos and videos of someone too young to consent (or talk, for that matter).
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#73One reason why I'm not buying Facebook: I don't have $2mil lying around. Another one; Why is Mark so reticent to IPO? Because he loses control? Or because that means making the numbers public, and people will see just where the money is going. Either way, if the CEO doesn't want to go public and may be forced to, that is not good.
One of the downsides of going public is that the customer base shifts---no longer are your customers the ones that buy/use your product, but your customers are the ones that buy your stock. And because of the legal requirement of increasing shareholder value, the company may be forced into short term profitability (make the numbers next quarter) instead of longer term long range profitability or stability.
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#74The only people what can make money on Facebook stock, is Chinese government officials. All they need to do, is to accumulate $FCBK stock and then allow Facebook.com to be used in China. Number of Facebook users will jump from 0.5B to 1.5B, same with the valuation from $50B to $150B ;)
This makes me wonder about net neutrality. If you had the jump on the announcement by a huge data carrier of site specific charging then wouldn't that give you a similar albeit smaller advantage?
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you ACTUALLY use FB? Yes. It probably helps that my family, and my wife's family, are all several thousand miles away and we just had our first child. We spend a lot of time on both FB and Skype, keeping everyone up to date.
so why FB and not Twitter, for example? Is it the simplicity of having your photo album and messaging under the same platform?
Photo Tagging and the News Feed are possibly facebooks two greatest inventions.
They also have: 2 way relationships, some measure of privacy, simplicity of use, Integrated Chat/Messaging, ubiquity, inertia
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#76One reason why I'm not buying Facebook: I don't have $2mil lying around. Another one; Why is Mark so reticent to IPO? Because he loses control? Or because that means making the numbers public, and people will see just where the money is going. Either way, if the CEO doesn't want to go public and may be forced to, that is not good.
Bill Gates was another person who didn't want to do an IPO. He almost cancelled it a number of times during the process as he felt it would just be a distraction to actually getting real business done. Mark Zuckerberg could have similar concerns.
I didn't know that. It certainly sounds reasonable, but is that what happened at Microsoft, after their IPO?
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#77One reason why I'm not buying Facebook: I don't have $2mil lying around. Another one; Why is Mark so reticent to IPO? Because he loses control? Or because that means making the numbers public, and people will see just where the money is going. Either way, if the CEO doesn't want to go public and may be forced to, that is not good.
He's only ever really had to answer to himself, right? From what I know of him, he probably likes that a lot more than having to answer to a bunch of shareholders.
Yeah, well, I for one hope they do have to publicise results, but they do NOT go for an IPO any time soon.
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had $50 billion on this day to buy part of 1 company, I'd take Goldman no question. A few years ago if you got Facebook stock at a lower valuation, sure that would make you a lot of money. But if Facebook makes $2 billion now, and they already have 25% of the internet users as members, where does the growth come from? 50b valuation is right given their current revenues, but they're not going to go from 25% to 10…
While I'm sure it's a factor, I'm not convinced that Facebook's growth needs involve having to increase their userbase in that manner. There are still many ways to monetize the existing one since I don't believe they've done that very efficiently yet.
There is a lot of room for internal growth. For example:
"Places is currently available in a few select countries with many more on the way."
I'm sure this isn't the only significant new development that is not rolled out around the world. With Facebook rolling out Places, they are also building out their global sales team.
However growth isn't everything. The cost of growth is important too! And we don't know what that is.
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's troublesome if you want to invest in facebook. Facebook has 10x as many users as myspace, and they've translated that into a great deal of hype. But they've yet to translate it into sizable revenue, let alone into profit.
Wait, let me get this straight. $2B in revenue is not 'sizeable' ?
Not in the grand scheme of things.
Yahoo! Market Cap: 22B. Revenue: 6.5B. Employees: 13,900 Facebook valuation: 50B. Revenue: 2B. Employees: > 1,300
OK, so the costs of running Facebook from a pure employee point of view are smaller than Yahoo. And their cost for traffic is certainly lower (as the YHOO numbers include revenue distributed to ad carriers).
But does the 2B revenue really justify a 50B valuation?
Re: Why I'm not buying Facebook
#80"And any advertiser who is trying to target me on the social network is wasting their money." He ruined a perfectly objective point with this subjective generalization. That being said, I'm with him for on most points, and I agree on the bigger picture.
The future of Facebook is not targeting you on 'a social network', its opening up an ad-sense competitor and targeting you on any website - with your personal information. The like and connect buttons are just the first step. With that in mind it sounds like a good deal to me.
One step closer to a Bladerunner future!