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In this Discussion
- 1234 June 2012
- Andrew June 2012
- Clever_girl May 2012
- distant_shoe June 2012
- Dr_William_Hayward May 2012
- flossy_log_lady June 2012
- freddy June 2012
- Julee_Cruise May 2012
- kdawg June 2012
- Leland June 2012
- Loose_Thread June 2012
- Lucy May 2012
- Marcus May 2012
- Matthew June 2012
- MirandaJuly June 2012
- swamp_knobbler_mahan June 2012
- ThickeningAgent June 2012
- YoursTruly June 2012
FB IPO
So, Facebook officially went public this morning. It opened to a rocky start, but now it's trading around its offer price of $40 / share. (Some cray cray fool put in an order with a $4,000 limit.)
Apparently Mike got up early to buy shares. Can we talk about this? This is going to put billions of dollars in the Facebook warchest, which means that they're going to be around forever and ever, even if we quit posting our pictures there. It doesn't feel like a good thing.
Mike, would you admit that you're buying in on the principle that other people will buy in later at higher prices and increase the value of your investment, or do you think Facebook is actually going to find a way to make money and become a real company deserving of its valuation?
Not saying I hate Facebook, I just hate the idea of Facebook as a publicly traded company. And someone explain to me how we're not just inflating another ginormous stock market bubble.
Apparently Mike got up early to buy shares. Can we talk about this? This is going to put billions of dollars in the Facebook warchest, which means that they're going to be around forever and ever, even if we quit posting our pictures there. It doesn't feel like a good thing.
Mike, would you admit that you're buying in on the principle that other people will buy in later at higher prices and increase the value of your investment, or do you think Facebook is actually going to find a way to make money and become a real company deserving of its valuation?
Not saying I hate Facebook, I just hate the idea of Facebook as a publicly traded company. And someone explain to me how we're not just inflating another ginormous stock market bubble.
Comments
I am deeply confused by the process of assessing value to these websites. My instincts tell me it's all smoke and mirrors. Unlike television networks, who produce copy-written content that maintains value for years/decades, FB only provides a service and is completely reliant on people continuing to use that service. What are shares of MySpace selling for these days?
What would you pay to be given a password that would give you access to everyone's accounts? Now there's a business model.
Isn't *most* stock market shit all smoke and mirrors? It's just rich dudes playing with numbers and pulling stuff out of thin air, mostly.
Loose Thread is right on. It's pretty fucked. But we give it up, because it's free.
Myspace never went public, they were acquired by Rupert Murdoch. They never really invested in the tech/design talent that Facebook has been investing in for the past couple of years, which gives them an edge.
I think FB will maintain and even grow its user levels for at least the next few years, which gives it value. People have a lot invested in Facebook - photos, relationships, events, jokes, staying in touch with acquaintances and friends around the world, etc. The incentive to stay is bigger than the incentive to leave.
http://gawker.com/5909410/ukrainin-men-how-american-men-are-using-the-russian-facebook-to-find-brides
There is some deep stuff going on, but I still think $111 billion is insane.
stocks are worth whatever someone will pay for it.
so buying stock in a company these days has little to do with the actual worth of the company in a traditional value sense.
more that people value the company.
investors value companies based on a number of criteria, only one of which is what they have in their bank account...but more important to the stock market (since it is something that happens over infinite time) is a seeming potential for infinite growth and a seeming potential that others may want to buy a share of stock.
people who buy and sell stock do so based on the apparent popular view of a company's value and whether others want to buy or sell the stock of that company on any given day or hour or minute.
so it is a slightly far abstraction from actual monetary profit that a company makes at any given time. its about the emotions of the people who bought a stock in it hoping others would want that stock later. whether they think others do or dont want to buy and for how much. (hopefully more than you bought it for)
so bad news that goes front page on huffpost might make a stock dip. a grand, opulent product announcement (ala jobs) will generally make it go up. news that a founding father of a company is dying makes it go down.
its silly shit like that.
so if a company which a ton of people follow the news of (like facebook), it turns into this abstracted thing
(news on a public company that does something like manufacture coal mining equipment or fish tank glass manufacturer will have a generally much slower burn due to its general boringness to the general investing public and a much more direct relationship to how the company is actually faring in real financial terms)
no news items means that "joe blow buys a couple stocks a year" type dude isnt gonna either rush to buy or sell the thing.
anyway its a pretty fair bet that due to the general popularity and ubiquity of facebook, people will, without looking very deep into confusing figures, buy stock in it thinking others will want to buy stock in it later, and for more money that they bought it for to begin with.
that fervor is then calculated into the asking price for one share of stock.
its a fair prediction this will fucking blow up real quick, then taper off
its just emotion.
thats why they delayed its ipo until 11am instead of right when the bell rang to open the market. to make sure it wasnt just gonna go to some absurd place (like maybe 100x the initial 40 asking price)
then people get on their e-forums later after the intial media coverage and they say "wtf is facebook worth anyway"
and it stays on the news for a few more days and people either say "you know what yr right fuck this shit im selling it before i get hosed" or they say "all press is good press, fb is here to stay and its gonna grow and grow and grow like a cancer, might as well keep this shit until it goes up"
i bet its the latter..
forkner says FB is a BUY.
sell it once it doubles, re-invest all of that money back into it when it dips to 60. rinse, repeat. send your unborn kids to college.
If the other numbers in this thread are true, then they made about a dollar in net revenue off each user last year.
It also means something like 1 of every 8 humans is a Facebook user. They own the most detailed map of desire that has ever existed. Also, the biggest shopping mall.
They know what makes people go to the mall better than anybody. It looks pretty good on "paper", especially if you went to business school to, like, learn how to appear to have organized the money required to pay people to build more malls.
Too bad it's such and ugly and crappy and hard to use space. But that's no surprise. Because it's a mall.
And when when the ocean quits providing 3/5th of our oxygen (because it has a market capitalization of zero) money will be one way humans determine who gets to breathe. Weapons will be another way.
If only the ocean had been a mall to begin with...
The most talked about company since ??? just had an IPO and shares were only $35/40 each! How could not buy at least one!? Just to be a part of it!
Don't over think it. I bought shares of Facebook because I want to OWN a piece of Facebook. I will hold those shares until I no longer want to own a part of that company, or until some cool expensive new Brook Brothers thing catches my eye... I mean, it's just money. Let's not be so worried about it. It's not even real! (Marcus taught me that.)
I also think the internet is beautiful.
But of those three: Humans, The Internet & Facebook, I think Facebook is by far the crappiest and most parasitical.
Facebook's beauty seems dependent on the beauty of humans and the beauty of the internet, whereas humans and the internet don't need Facebook to be beautiful.
Of course, the other thing that is interesting about Facebook is the money, as seems evident in the fact of this thread.
I don't know if you guys saw, but I helped a friend raise $10,000 in two days this week so she wouldn't lose her home. Long story, beautiful outcome and FBook was definitely a crucial tool.
I'm glad there was a self-organizing Facebook-space of hundreds of millions of friends and passersby to respond to and build the myriad stories that came together in the money to help out someone who was suffering through a raw deal.
I still think the Facebook machine itself is crappy and devious, far from beautiful. But I don't begrudge Mikey for wanting a piece of it (and a piece of the action). It's part of the world we live in. Get in!
*Like in the Art School meaning of The Sublime. Edmund Burke, et al.
There's something about the way "Pages" work in Facebook that just doesn't seem to gel as places for community conversations. I can't quite put my finger on why it doesn't seem to work. Part of it is the way new posts crowd old posts downward. Part of it is the way posts bounce to the left or right column as they sink. Also, why can't I "be" a Page-identity and see and post to "my real" personal page? Also, what are the "automatic page break" rules so I know what is going to appear before the jump? Also why can't I insert my own html code to make links? AND WHY TF can't you edit posts on the fly?
FB gives me just enough control over the look and action of my posts to make me aware of how little control I have over them.
All that kind of stuff bugs me about FBook.
UHX is sooooo much more elegant.
SRSLY!
previously, i had just thought of FB as an extension of my mailing list and used it for promotions and such, and in the process have amassed way too many 'friends'. this pretty much made FB useless for me, but then for a recent class I taught I set up a FB Group page just for the class, and in that more controlled/condensed environment some really cool things happened.
But I agree 100% that UHX is much better. if FB is worth $170 Billion, how much is UHX worth? we are fucking rich!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(It was down nearly 11% today.)
When I went looking for an official press photo to accompany it, I found the "b-roll" video of Zuckerberg and it was so weird! http://newsroom.fb.com/Photos-and-B-Roll/Footage-of-Mark-Zuckerberg-1f9.aspx
http://futureofmusic.org/blog/2012/05/22/facebooks-ipo-what-does-it-mean-musicians
Is it true that FB charges for services?
Third party apps are a mix of paid and free.
I would suspect that Facebook doesn't really consider musicians at all when they are rolling out new things.
Mike, if you think they don't consider musicians at all, it's because you've never talked to their music team. Numbers are confidential, but a ton of their ad revenue is music based.
Something i didn't mention is just because you 'Like' something, it doesn't mean you're seeing everything that gets posted. If I 'like' Dolly Parton I used to see everything that Dolly posted, but no more---now it is algorithmic, and there is only roughly a 10% chance I will have it displayed on my page. Now they are trying to get Dolly Parton to pay for ads targeting people who 'like' Dolly Parton. So when Dolly buys an ad, I am guaranteed to see it!
In the old days of 2002 I would have just signed up for Dolly's email list and she could have emailed me whenever she wanted!
I have paid for ads in the past for a couple of events. They worked okay! They make more sense for venues & promoters than they do for musicians.
To be fair, a lot of people working in a lot of different media make a lot of money trying to sell not-very-good promotional tools to musicians.
The reason you only see 10% of Dolly's updates is because 90% of her updates are shitty. Facebook ranks the "interestingness" of Dolly's posts based on how many likes and such they get. So as long as she is posting quality shit that people engage with, all her "Likers" will see it.
As a user, that's pretty awesome, cause let's be honest, most bands post boring shit! Who cares that YACHT is playing a show in some town I'm not in? NOT ME! Now, when they post a video, and people start Liking the heck out of it, then it'll show up in my feed.
Or, if they launch a new thing and want to ENSURE people see it, they can pay for that. Bands/Musicians are businesses. They are working to sell music to people. Facebook has a collection of people that bands want to get in front of. So, like Kraft, Bushmills, Brooks Brothers, or PlastiDip, they have to pay for that.
Users first, bands second. Pay to play.
And of course, in the end, why doesn't every band have a mailing list? It's a MUCH better tool.
Facebook's algorithim leads to dumb stuff like where pages always end their post with stupid questions or prompts so it is more likely to generate "Interaction". as if interaction is the measure of how good a thing is. Or "like if you think Republicans are stupid"--of course it gets lots of likes! doesn't mean it's a good post!
The blog Regarding often has no comments, but it is often way better than other blogs that have similar sized readerships but lots of comments. "Interaction" is a stupid metric.
I need to read Eli Pariser's book about this.
I am glad we agree about mailing lists though!
one time i had a mailing list but then mailchimp asked me for money so i said fuck it
anyway fb is like such a shitty tool for musicians
but its free, so you just deal
myspace in its hey-day was way better
then it got bought out, then they redesigned it and all the bands and musicians abandoned it and it just sits there as the first google hit that no one EVER clicks on
algorythmic interestingness measurements are like so fucking dumb
i will never and have never and should never have to trust someone elses' filtering of information on my social network
its the most annoying trend there is, and it puts this element of power and control of the distribution of info back in the hands of the creators of these open systems
i know twitter aint showing me a full feed of everyone i subscribe to
neither does facebook
it is just so counter intuitive and the thought that there are teams of people making a living having focus groups and looking at data and click rates and behavior and trying to be all nice about how they are filtering things for me just makes my skin crawl
i'm never gonna be one of those guys that "just trusts the filter"
i dont trust pitchfork or the radio or spin magazine for my music, the mall for my clothes, cnn for my news... now i have to add: i dont trust facebook for showing me what my "friends" aresaying on it, twitter for what people say on it.... there is some robot filtering, and a robot is programmed with parameters set by well meaning(ish) programmers
but roboto plans always fail, both in the movies and in real life
another big fail: itunes genre filters
and they keep at it
jesus how fucking stupid is their genre filters
and the itunes store? the thing that people consider this revolutionary thing...the genre categories are just terrible
just un-usable except for maybe some alien grandmother
i am just fire-spitting now
but filters that you can not un-do just seem like another way
for people to control the distribution channels
and are therefor problematic to the core
and it all just falls in line with every other mafia-ass capitalist mentality
"control the means of distribution and you control the entire market"
and yeah fuck that
and i will never pay a red cent to fb to make sure my posts i put up there as a band actually get seen
that is just crooked
the people that clicked "like" on my page should just automatically get everything i put up there
or else THEY should be able to control what they see
but these fucking "show only important" filters are dumb robots that will never be able to understand the true nature of what the fuck i want to read about and deem important
and now they are giving me this timeline with more filters built in
all this seems like the exact wrong direction to take "data management"
anyway
fb
just really not designed to work well as a center for communication for musicians
or for movies
or for any business, really
but still i would buy that stock because fuck it it will probably go back up pretty soon
or not
i dont know
fuck it
So I guess it works pretty well as a communication medium for those types of companies. LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR.
UHX works be because there are 10 of us here. If there were 10,000 we might have to think of ways to keep it useful and filtering out dumb shit might be a way to do that.
You can't be mad at Facebook for filtering or asking for money any more than you can be mad at a rock for not being edible. Instead you can have fun with Facebook by taking advantage of what they offer. Seriously, make an ad you guys! It's a fun game you play with real money. Like poker. And more fun than FarmVille!
It's a weird default setting. I'm glad there's a choice for seeing less updates, but I don't know why it's the default. I definitely set some of my annoying relatives at "See Only Important Updates," but I want to see EVERYTHING my friends say.
Also, Twitter doesn't filter feeds, does it? I'm pretty sure I see everything on my twitter feed.
RULES
Members of UHX create the name and concept of a website that we will both advertise
We individually create ads for it, using our own targeting strategies
Both parties spend no more than $10
At the end of 1 week, whoever has generated more clicks is refunded their $10 by the loser
WHAT SAY YOU
I just recently rejoined FB and I am finding it really confusing.
Google Plus is actually good for one very awesome thing: watching YouTube videos with other people via Google Hangouts. Find a really stupid Lifetime movie (Cyber Seduction, Cyber Bully, anything else that is Cyber related), start a hangout with your homie and open the sidebar chat and then have fun making jokes.