FaceBook - head of another DotCom crash?

[BoRED S2upid]

What are they going to do with 100bn? Buy up any other Internet company that's a threat maybe.

[FourWheelDrift]

Zuckerman could buy a lot of zit cream for $100billion.

[Morningside]

BoRED S2upid said:

What are they going to do with 100bn? Buy up any other Internet company that's a threat maybe.

Ah! The eBay method.

Lets wait 10 years and see how it develops. How can you really improve on it? More damn plug-ins I suppose until everyone gets pissed off with datamining and quits.

[Murph7355]

TonyHetherington said:

Don't forget, the whole point of facebook ads is that it's heavily targeted.

I like cars, photography and bicyles so I see ads for all those things. I never see an ad for One-Direction or My Little Pony. whereas 8yr old girls (and it's known they're 8, don't forget) will never see an ad for cars.

I have a group for my band, and we can even target our messages to our userbase by age, location, interests, relationship status etc., let alone the ads

I was being somewhat glib.

Though their targeted advertising must work really well. I mean, you would think a chunk of their 1bn users might be in the market for a car, and yet GM don't think it worthwhile. It would seem others think the same way too.

Unless their demographic is so specific that there aren't many car buyers?

(Or, perhaps, people with more taste than to buy a Vauxhall...mind you, looking at how the CEO dresses a pimped up Nova wouldn't be a surprise ).

[mattnunn]

Facebook, I've heard of that, is it like FriendsReunited?

[Trommel]

mattnunn said:

Facebook, I've heard of that, is it like FriendsReunited?

Probably will be in about two years.

[Deva Link]

Trommel said:

mattnunn said:

Facebook, I've heard of that, is it like FriendsReunited?

Probably will be in about two years.

The founders of FriendsReunited did pretty well, by any normal standards, out the flotation. Facebook is in a different universe financially, but then unless you want to do something like buy a premiership football club, how much does one person need?

[Morningside]

Trommel said:

mattnunn said:

Facebook, I've heard of that, is it like FriendsReunited?

Probably will be in about two years.

6 Aug 2009 – ITV sells Friends Reunited for £25m, having paid £175m for it.

Facebook. $xxxx billion now, give it 10-15 years.

[turbobloke]

Not sure if there is enough popcorn in the universe for this one - but good luck to those making a quick billion or ten out of it.

[Mojocvh]

[redacted]

[arfur]

Deva Link said:

Saw a report today that says General Motors will stop buying ads on Facebook as research has shown they have no effect.
They will continue to use free Facebook postings to promote themselves though.

I used to have an advert running on FB. Never generated a single lead but cost me about 20 quid a week for my test period (2 months). The stats showed that the click thru was terrible. Either people didnt find it interesting or simply like me, ignore the ads completely

[DonkeyApple]

arfur said:

I used to have an advert running on FB. Never generated a single lead but cost me about 20 quid a week for my test period (2 months). The stats showed that the click thru was terrible. Either people didnt find it interesting or simply like me, ignore the ads completely

I think that only certain products can be sold via these types of media.

If you had a different product I suspect you would have found the returns quite impressive.

My wild guess is that you could sell tampons in the shape of Wanted band members by the bucket load but I can't imagine any product of actual use being sold.

The other key thing is that sites like FB aren't about direct sales which smaller companies crave but brand awareness.

FB is extremely powerful for putting your brand name infront of an extremely specific audience. So if you want to launch the next Hannah Montana you can run a visual promotion on FB for x months lead before the show starts to build the hype and specifically target 7 year old girls, pedophiles and retards.

I think FB is hugely valuable to many advertisers but utterly worthless to smaller businesses other than if you can target a specific geographic like your town just to ensure everyone in the town is aware of you. If you can do this type of targeting then I would say that FB could be very powerful for brand awareness for small local businesses like hairdressers and generally any business which sells shiny things that no one really needs but every simpleton has to have.

[CommanderJameson]

$38 a share, so about $100B out of the gate.

fk me.

http://newsroom.fb.com/News/Facebook-Announces-Pri...

[rohrl]

$38 per share, total value over $100 billion.

No thanks, I don't believe it's worth that for a second.

[rohrl]

How's MySpace doing these days?

[Xaero]

Short term it could be worth a bet. When facebook hits the magic 1 million mark I suspect the value will go up a bit.

I know advertising is lucrative (I make money on my feeble website in the same way), but Facebook have a huge number of options on where they can go. I think the money transaction side will be the first thing they need to get developed. Pay with Facebook rather than pay by paypal will go a long way as long as its secure and reliable. Who loves paypal anyway? That way the bank of facebook develops and they can skim a small percentage off each transaction. That's what I'd be doing if I was in charge anyway. They already have linked in with companies like flixster to pay for movies. When the average joe (all 1 billion of them) starts making internet payments via facebook, then they have a much more reliable system in my opinion to increase revenue.

[TonyHetherington]

Murph7355 said:

Though their targeted advertising must work really well. I mean, you would think a chunk of their 1bn users might be in the market for a car, and yet GM don't think it worthwhile. It would seem others think the same way too.

I think DonkeyApple put it well, above, in that it's building brand awareness rather than click throughs. something which is frustratingly difficult to gauge and put into numbers. Making it even more difficult for marketing departments to justify.

Someone above also raised a very good point; Facebook makes $1bn a year profit last year. Many cmopanies throughout the globe make more than that.

[DonkeyApple]

Xaero said:

Short term it could be worth a bet. When facebook hits the magic 1 million mark I suspect the value will go up a bit.

I know advertising is lucrative (I make money on my feeble website in the same way), but Facebook have a huge number of options on where they can go. I think the money transaction side will be the first thing they need to get developed. Pay with Facebook rather than pay by paypal will go a long way as long as its secure and reliable. Who loves paypal anyway? That way the bank of facebook develops and they can skim a small percentage off each transaction. That's what I'd be doing if I was in charge anyway. They already have linked in with companies like flixster to pay for movies. When the average joe (all 1 billion of them) starts making internet payments via facebook, then they have a much more reliable system in my opinion to increase revenue.

They are large enough and sufficiently global to launch their own currency.

Why bugger about competing against Paypal when you could completely reinvent the way the next generation process payments on the web and kill Paypal and control massive flows.

My money is on a Face Book Dollar being issued and asset backed. It could easily become the single currency of a mobile generation.

Hold FBDs and wherever you are you can pay electronically.

Currencies to date have been rooted in geography. FB is global. People have been trying to make a global currency for decades. Other people have been trying to make an Internet currency. FB has the weight to combine the two.

[Dracoro]

rohrl said:

How's MySpace doing these days?

Whilst what happened to Facebook remains to be seen, I'm not sure what the point of the above post is. We all know what happened to British Leyland so does that mean people won't/shouldn't invest in Ford/VW/Toyota/etc. as, after all, they're all in the same business also.

I'm no fan of FB (or MySpace for that matter) but to tar them all with the same brush, especially given that now the two are quite different, is daft.

[Murph7355]

TonyHetherington said:

I think DonkeyApple put it well, above, in that it's building brand awareness rather than click throughs. something which is frustratingly difficult to gauge and put into numbers. Making it even more difficult for marketing departments to justify.

Someone above also raised a very good point; Facebook makes $1bn a year profit last year. Many cmopanies throughout the globe make more than that.

I would have thought an organisation like GM would be all about brand awareness, and the importance of getting to people early.

I would also have thought they employ armies of people to analyse such things.

And yet they've withdrawn?

I'm really the wrong demographic I think (41, too old ). But I strongly suspect people just ignore the ads.

I also strongly suspect that FB will become unfashionable as quickly as it became fashionable. Especially if they try to leverage those "billion" users' details, pump them full of ads, try charging for use or have technical issues (poor apps, security problems etc).