MySpace had nowhere near the users/captive audience that Facebook has. I'm no FB fan but it's far better/bigger than MySpace and has become "ingrained" in popular culture in way the others never did. For that reason, people will need a VERY good reason to move away to something that, ultimately, will do the same thing.

Ads to a large captive audience is the marketeers dream, just a matter of doing it right so that the audience isn't put off (as well as FB striking the right deals and ways to make it work). It needs to be subtle and unobtrusive.

I'll echo what many have said, it's worth something but nowhere near the valuations banded around.

$1 bil profit on $3.7 bil revenue is pretty good going in anyone's book, particularly on a social media site that is seen by many as a toy rather than a serious tool.

Whether they are worth the valuation will be determined by the market, but the world-is-a-changing and the old rules are quickly getting cast by the wayside. The whole IPO business is an old-school game anyway, and I think will be decreasingly relevant in the years to come, particularly as intelligent people who create companies continue to care more about the product than they do about lining their pockets (Zuckerberg included).

Fixed


plus, the general mobile site you can access via browser on your phone is much better.


The app isn't that bad really, I only check FB on my phone and even then I may only have a peruse to kill a few minutes every 2-3 days so its slow, clunky workings arent bad enough for me to get annoyed. If you used it every day, couple of times a day, then maybe it could be termed " a load of bobbins".

Facebook has some unique "sticky" propositions. It's a website, but the content keeps changing, bringing people back. The content is also generated by friends and acquaintances and other parties that the user has chosen to keep tabs on, so people don't generally consider what they read to be spam. Facebook itself has an amazing amount of data on users. Product advertisers can therefore reach deeper into their markets. People spend more time on facebook than on any other site, I believe, so it enables advertisers to target users for longer times, giving more exposure to their messages.

Facebook's challenge is to convert all of this into money, and to prevent other people from coming along and taking away their business through poaching users or providing a better social networking product or giving advertisers a better advertising platform or allowing hacks and other service disruptions from making it an unpleasant experience.

Facebook has already monetized some things (advertising), and is working to monetize others. Games, product recommendations and group discounts, events, etc., etc.

So, yes, FB has legs and is valuable, especially with its huge userbase, which is growing.

The mobile app sucks. No doubt they are working on it. That is the future.

Can facebook be cloned? I think so. It's just programming, and if better tech comes along, people will leave. It's hard to leave friends behind and start a community of friends all over again, so that's something any competitor will have to address, either by making the migration for the entire community easy, or by offering something so compelling that people leave of their own accord. Google+ hasn't done so yet...but I hear its userbase is growing. Personally, I am using G+ more and more, I like the integration with Picasa and I like the circles concept.

I do think fb will go by the wayside one day. When will that happen, who knows...certainly not for a year or two. Until then, will it make money? I think so. They already are making a ton of it and the profits are growing. Who's the competition right now? Just Google+ and they are a distant second.

Twitter is interesting...it allows you to keep track of friends (community) and any other entities you are interested in. That could be monetized the same as fb, but if the entities start selling too hard, people will get turned off. I think fb is the better model, at least for me it is, but I don't know enough about twitter.

FB is a good investment at some lower price point. In the short term, I am sure the stock price will go up. But stock prices in the long term are driven by earnings growth. Can fb keep its earnings growing hand over fist? Maybe, but certainly not enough to justify the valuation placed on it already.

The $100-odd billion valuation at 100X earnings is as scary as Mark Zuckerberg's girlfriend!

These sort of figures always intrigue me. Presumably they are making no claims that these are unique users? In which case, I wonder what the unique user count is.

1bn constitutes a very large %age of the world's population when you strip out those too young/old to FBers, people without access etc etc.

I think it's more a reflection of his friends than of Facebook.

That's not a client base, it's a product. Where they need to make money is selling that product to others.

I have no idea, and as I'm not interested in their shares, don't care. I'm just amused that people think the users are the customers rather than the product of Facebook (and yes, I'm a user too).

Fair enough I have very little interest, am not on it and won't be buying the shares I still think its had its day though something else will come along im sure.

What on earth did they spend $2.7Bn on?