That makes sense Mannfm11. or even a referral fee for a real customer. but per click is dumbassery

Lets just say they wouldn't get my money Low

Memories of $150.00 monthly bills from AOL and Compu-serve who charged by the hour or minute popped up when I read this. When AOL and Compu-serve went to a monthly all you could eat plan after the BS 2000 free hours per month disks came is when ISP provided dial up service at one price came along for the "re4al" internet, as Karl well remembers being a charter member of killing off AOL's cash cow club.

I can't help but think that at some point the tiered data and payment by minutes plan will disappear soon or later for for the 3 or 4 viable sources of wireless services. If people get too many surprises on their monthly bills they just won't play anymore. That doesn't make FaceBook worth 99 times earnings. I think the whole social media thing is another "phase" that will sooner, rather than later be considered part and parcel of of any site as the market fragments. All of Which makes Facebook a walking Yahoo.

What the hell is Facebook?

--Sent from an old rotary phone in upstate Montana using a genset for electricity--

Coke is sugar water.
Facebook is a brand. When kids say nothing is official until it is "facebook official" - now that's a powerful brand. Today, that is.

99x earnings? The valuation is SF saying "up yours" to NY. This all smells like tulips to me ( you know, the kind of the bulb market crash, and the 2k Nazzy crash?), but I've been wrong about Facebook since it was limited to @harvard.edu email and here it is, a freight train of special interest money circling chairs to music and itching to dump on grandma's retirement fund before the music ends.

What's even funnier is Zuckerberg saying he's not focused on revenue...
Now THAT is a paradigm! Who needs revenue when you have a brand that sells shares? Sock puppet redux? Who knows. Maybe we're all haters and secret admirers at the same time.

A stock that doesn't give dividends is a next thing to a Ponzi scheme. At 100 x earnings, even if they decide to give dividends, and then even if they would give 50% of earnings to dividends, it would be equivalent to 0.5% interest. I can get better than that.

Buying just to sell to the next buyer at higher price is a Ponzi scheme, and the fact that the first few people into it will earn money, does not make it anything else - it's still a Ponzi.

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Mannfm,

The cost per click on Google ads is now outrageous, the do no evil company needs to be audited.

I hate to say it but Facebook needs a $10B IPO just to stay relevant. They need to have the money to buy something worthwhile. I look at the facebook usage in the house (the intensity has dropped by two orders of magnitude). Other social media sites are getting hot as well.

Facebook= Myspace

Like most IPOs, I think the those who can get the IPO price are banking on using the opportunity to unload their shares to the sheeple who bid it up. That's why they're hyping it so much - it's one stock the dim-wits will gorge on.

Recent news on my old dotcom. We had a $230 million IPO back in 2000.

TechFlash wrote..

This year could be a rough one for Seattle dot-com Onvia Inc.
The company reported an 84 percent drop in profits for the first quarter of 2012, down to $60,000 from $393,000 the year before.

Revenue was also down 11 percent to $5.5 million, compared to $6.1 million the same time last year.

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2012/05....

Genesis wrote..

Oh I'd take an allocation if I could get it, and flip it on the first day too.

I did that a lot in 1999, and make lots of money. But I didn't sit on any of the stocks and I'm glad I didn't, as nearly all were losers over the next six months to a year.

I got in the queue with Fidelity, and then read their FAQ. Is this common?

Quote:

When can I sell my shares?

As with any investment, you are free to sell the securities obtained during an IPO whenever you determine it is appropriate for you. However, if you sell within the first 15 calendar days from the start of trading in the secondary market, it will affect your ability to participate in new issue equity public offerings through Fidelity for a defined period of time.

The defined period of time which you will be prevented from participating depends on how many times you have flipped shares in the past and a breakdown of those "exclusion" periods are listed below:

-The first time customer sells shares of an IPO obtained through Fidelity in first 15 calendar day they will be prevented from participating in IPO process for 180 days.

-The second time customer sells shares of an IPO obtained through Fidelity in first 15 calendar day they will be prevented from participating in IPO process for 365 days.

-The third time customer sells shares of an IPO obtained through Fidelity in first 15 calendar day they will be prevented from participating in IPO process permanently.

Facebook = TBTF data mine.

They threaten this, yes. I never actually had it enforced against me, but I did get some angry phone calls from the brokerage.

Isn't the threat game grand?

Gen: There are companies that exist for the purpose of repackaging ad content to make it more palatable to the end user, mobile or not. Fb may well find a compatible party in this space and make end users actually WANT to download content with ads embedded within them. The end users will not even realize that the ad is there. Lots of these larger companies are looking to do brand reinforcement, just getting their name into the conversation is often enough. Don't discount the model quite yet, it may surprise you. I'm not advising anyone to do anything, in my view, for myself, I am personally not going to go long Fb anytime soon.

Someone please help me here. All the news sites are saying FB will be worth $96B if they price at the high end of the range which is $35/share.

FB says they will have 2,138,085,037 shares outstanding. Over allotment coming from the company is only 6 million shares.

$35 times 2.138B = $75B not 96. What gives?

Crazy! They "punish" you for selling your own stock?

Talk about trying to drive the price up!

What a scam...

http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=35.369....

Old photo of FB data center. Now it's 3 frickin' huge buildings stacked to the gills with servers. Data center serves eastern US and all of Europe.

Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure...

fidelity is offering facebook ipo?

Matt, for eligible accounts, yes.

Gen, honest question.

In the absence of any meaningful corporate privacy laws, Facebook is in possession of perhaps the largest and most valuable database on the face of the planet - who is friends with who, and how good of friends they are.

The 100 million Facebook account leak a year ago I'm sure made it into the bowels of several Fortune 100 marketing departments for analysis.

With Facebook's database (you'd get this direct from FB itself, so privacy settings won't matter), they can help insurers set premiums effectively (your friends are all drunks, so your premium should be higher or payout percentage lower) and help producers market more effectively to trendsetters (Amy bought our product first, then 5 of her friends did. Amy is a trendsetter. We market to Amy and not to her 5 friends, saving us money.)

To date, they have not monetized this database.

If they do, they will be invaluable to the insurance industry, healthcare industry, and consumer products industry. People have shown that they do not care about privacy, I think that FB could sell it - "Sure, we're giving your info to insurers and marketers, but trust us you will like the additional savings and products."

What do you think of this relative to their implied P/E?

Not a Facebook fanboi and not getting in on this horrific ****show of an IPO, just wondering what you think.

I think if it happens it makes the value of the company zero in an afternoon.

This is the sort of thing that will, the first time it results in actual action taken against someone that disadvantages them, will detonate the firm.

Fair enough. Is there *any* way in your view that FB could significantly monetize their database without compromising the company?

In other words, having heard my answer you'd now like me to answer it again?

Sorry. Given your reply, it would seem that as long as it only *advantages* a user, they can monetize it all they want.

The FCRA is quite clear -- if you use a report to disadvantage a consumer you must disclose on request where you got the adverse information you used and what it was.

The first time this happens without foreknowledge and consent by a Facebook user, and they get caught doing it, the value of that database goes to zero.