How much would you pay for Facebook stock?

I'm not sure how much I would pay, but I always think of stocks like google and say "if only".


http://mashable.com/2011/06/13/facebook-ipo-100-billion/

 

I'd pay about 1/2 of what Google or Apple is going for on the day of the FB IPO.

Google and Apple are both category killers like FB is, but they also have huge amounts of capital reserves and have tons of R&D for killer apps (no pun intended) coming down the pike.

What does FB actually have? A niche (albeit huge), a category-killer name, and a potentially deadly reliance on outside advertisers to stay afloat.

 

Not much. Despite the marketing talk of the past decade, brand position does not automatically equal revenue or true valuation.

 

Heck, I wish I'd bought Apple Computer stock in 2003. It was $6 a share then.

Now, it's $326 a share.

 

Facebook is one that scares me. It's huge now, but who's to say it won't be completely gone in a few years.

I could see buying it the day it comes out and then selling pretty quickly, but I don't see it doing well long term.

 

What does FB actually have? Between $2 billion and $4 billion in ad revenue for 2011.

 

Are we talking Farmville bucks or actual money?

 

Actual money. I'm stunned at how well Facebook has been able to monetize in the last two years.

 

Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Let's compare FB to, say, ESPN. Chances are, nothing is going to come around in the next 10 years or so that will completely replace ESPN in the minds of consumers (unfortunately, perhaps).

But there's a very good chance that's exactly what will happen to FB. See Space, My and Online, America for proof.

 

They belong somewhere in between those two. They've already lasted longer than MySpace's heyday, and they have actual significant revenue. But they are nowhere near AOL.

 

There's a good chance Facebook is peaking or has peaked.
It lost 6 million members in the month of May.
Facebook blames the methodology used in obtaining that number for it being so high. A "social media expert" on CNN attributes much of it to college students graduating and deleting their accounts so prospective employers don't see drunken party pictures of them and to parents of minors cutting off their kids' Facebook accounts. He also says that close to half the people in the US already have a Facebook account, so Facebook will have to look overseas to grow.
If you want to watch the story (haven't seen a text version) you can view it here:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2011/06/14/facebook.loses.millions.users.cnn?hpt=hp_t2

 

I read a different report yesterday that said they will probably start increasing again and should get more of the older crowd on the site. Something like up to 152 million users in the US.

Anyway, here's another IPO... can't believe how many of these online companies are getting stock now.

http://mashable.com/2011/06/15/pandora-ipo-price/