this is great news - end of the hype era and the beginning of the reality and earnings era for Facebook.
Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
81–90 of 145 posts
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#82Here's why I am going to buy:
Google's Retargeting product drives insanely strong conversions for clients vs. their traditional adwords.
You're able to re-reach folks that, by arriving on your site in the first place, have categorized themselves as interested and, as a result, close at a much higher rate.
Google's recent move to consolidate privacy policies, and in effect, sets of customer data is going to provide massively better targeting capabilities.
As a result they'll be able to sell the exact same ad-space to advertisers and yet advertisers will see better results, thanks to better targeting.
In the "bid-for-space" model this will translate to higher ECPM to Goog, to site owners, etc.
Now, enter FB, coiner of the "Social graph" and consolidator of all the things and people.
They are doubtlessly working to build and improve their advertising products.
They are going to earmark a lot of that $100b to buy large advertising businesses, just like Goog bought AdMob etc, that they believe they can improve ECPMs on.
Is it speculative? Absolutely.
Does $100b already have a lot of this expected upside baked-in? No doubt.
But still, I have seen the future of online advertising and it be profitable.
He with the most customer data wins, and FB has that in abundance.
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#83What would the world look like if Facebook IPOs and Apple immediately buys them out with their horde of cash?
What on earth would Apple do with Facebook? Apple, by virtue of actually making things people want to buy, has massive profit margins compared to Facebook, and can more usefully spend their horde of cash on, say, cornering the market on NAND flash.
To retro-paraphrase your question: "What on Earth would Apple do with NeXT?"
Sometimes it's not about the product, but the people. Maybe the current Apple board /really/ wants Zuck to run the show. Best way to do that is to buy FB.
I agree with you, though. Apple buying FB would be a not-so-small mistake.
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook has skirted this for a year now. They sold a bloc of shares to, IIRC, Goldman Sachs who runs it like a private equity fund, selling shares of the fund to as many of its rich clients as possible. In other words, they NAT'ed the shares.
What does it mean that they "NAT'ed the shares"?
like the networking NAT (network address translation).
To facebook, goldman sachs is a single investor. However, many individual investors are part of that GS banner.
In much the same way, with a NAT, there may be many computers within an internal network (but to the outside world there is a single external IP address)
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
My (sure to be wrong) Facebook predictions: * The Facebook Phone * The Facebook Netbook * Major user datamining product sales to global governments * Acquiring binge (gaming, education (I think they will go for Khan Academy) * video hosting * Their own voip platform Facebook still has a lot of room to innovate, not that they would necessarily be successful in each iteration. But I would say that the number one thing…
I'd like to add to your list of Facebook products. * Facebook Search Engine.
I don't get why people seem to ignore this. If facebook added internet search to their site they would instantly become the second biggest provider. I would be very surprised if they weren't already working on this.
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#86IPO is inevitable but timing is not right, groupon, zynga, LinkedIn, pandora are all trading at very low valuations and so is investor sentiment
GRPN: 9.5X sales ZNGA: 6.5X sales LNKD: 16.2X sales P: 8.7X sales S&P 500: 1.3X sales. It appears that valuations are very high right now. The stocks are down from their peaks—-in other words, investors are not at a record level of optimism about these companies. But a fair assessment is that they've gone from "Wildly optimistic" to "Optimistic."
What's interesting is that even the most aggressive ratio among these companies, the 16.2X, would value Facebook at approximately $60 billion. And yet, the company is expected to offers shares at a valuation of $75-$100 billion.
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wall Street made a mistake with Google, since now their shares now are worth 5 times as much as they were at the opening. August 2004: AAPL $16 Google $85/share (thought it was $100/share, huh) Now: AAPL $447 Google $576/share 447/16 ~= 27.94 85*27.94 ~= 2374.90 So no, Google's shares are not worth 5 times more. Their value went down a massive amount in six years.
Now, this is stupid.
The point is that comparing Google's price in 2004 and 2012 to the price of gold is just as arbitrary as comparing it to the price of AAPL.
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#88The S-1 filing will almost certainly contain enough info to allow my bets with jacquesm and il, that Facebook's revenues would reach $2B/yr by 2014, to settle (2 years early!):
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689993
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163144
Would still be happy to take $200 in Facebook stock instead. :)
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#89It'll be interesting to see what Facebook employees do once the IPO goes through. There must be a good number that want to break off and do their own thing, but are sitting on stock they don't want to lose. It'll be interesting to see what ideas/startups they come up with. Didn't the same happen when Google IPO'd?
I think the canonical example (but not necessarily the first) is the "PayPal Mafia" [1]. Many early PayPal employees went on to found successful companies in the wake of the dot-com bust at the end of the nineties.
Re: Facebook to File for IPO Next Week
#90The S-1 filing will almost certainly contain enough info to allow my bets with jacquesm and il , that Facebook's revenues would reach $2B/yr by 2014, to settle (2 years early!): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689993 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163144 Would still be happy to take $200 in Facebook stock instead. :)
Revenue is (estimated at) already over $4b a year:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-20/facebook-revenue-wi...