Karl,

FB can also charge for fan pages - They are very useful for organizations.

Uh huh. We'll see about that.

Facebook is a zero.

You got the whole show!

If you look at what Google has done, a big part of their drop in CPCs has been brands feeling that they need to buy their brands in order to block competing advertisers.

I think at some point a lot of the companies that have spent heavily on building a following inside Facebook will start to reach fewer and fewer of their followers & be told that they need to pay for the privilege. And those who say no thanks will at some point have their official pages carpet bombed with ads for competing companies.

This process will happen slowly (much like it has with Google forcing brands to buy their own brands) but I don't doubt it happens eventually.

Still not a fan of Facebook as a company though, but eventually they will find a way to force big brands to buy in.


Also if the folks at Facebook are smart they would buy a browser like Opera (should be under a billion) & a smaller independent search engine like Blekko (maybe 100 million to 250 million). Each of these would probably cost 1% or less of the company & allow them to hedge being just a social play to owning a serious browser and search traffic.

Google's fast growth in browser marketshare with Chrome shows that marketshare can be bought if you are committed to it & market it on high traffic sites. And Microsoft launched So.cl after the Facebook IPO too, so I think Facebook would be smart to build and monetize a search channel of their own, such that they have something left if/when the social bubble pops (as privacy concerns eventually spook people off of participating on the monolithic social networks).

It won't work because Facebook users don't click on ads.

If nobody bothers with the ad then it has zero value. That's Facebook's fundamental problem and it has no solution to it.

FaceBook has ads?

Funny, I never noticed

I agree with Betty White

Surprised the Fed didn't get a mention as a repository for at least a portion of the mortgages/mortgage backed securities since there is some evidence. They even admit it's marked at "face value" (I assume it was the original face value and not a marked down value at time of transfer because of the "impaired" collateral).

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h....

4. Guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. Current [face value of the securities], which is the remaining principal balance of the underlying mortgages.

I know there's not a prayer this happened, but it would be so cool if the Fed owned some of the $567 billion of CDS via JPM. Instant solvency from the insolvent.

Forgot to mention there are six mature women on my Facebook page who are only a click away from realizing their lifelong dream.....to have me as a companion, albeit if only briefly.

Sad that you have to watch russian tv to get anything resembling reality from news.

Thanks!

Quote:

It won't work because Facebook users don't click on ads.

They don't much on Facebook (a social network...even Google took in the crapper when they did a $900 million exclusive ad deal with MySpace - which later sold for $35 million), but they do click ads on some other sites (especially search engines).

I did a survey (using Google's survey tool) asking users if the search results had ads on them, what color the ad background was, where the ads might be located, etc. ... generally speaking most people are absolutely clueless about search ads http://www.seobook.com/consumer-ad-aware....

Even directly after viewing a search result with 3 ads in it, most users are uncertain of where ads may appear, what color the ads are, and if the search result even had any ads in it. Which is why individual search ads can get a 10% or 20% CTR, paid ads can capture over half of the clicks on commercial keywords, & Google is worth $200 billion.

The point I was trying to get across was anyone with near-utility marketshare that reaches most active web users (say Google + Youtube, Yahoo, Facebook) can easily push itself into the parallel lines of business & monetize those other sectors. Yahoo! being the dim bulb in the lot took until this past week to launch any attempt at a web browser.

Google is paying Mozilla nearly $1 billion for default search placement in the Firefox web browser for 3 years.

If you look at IACI post-split, most that expansion (about a triple) is due to search arbitrage and buying search marketshare with crappy toolbar adware/bundleware on "free smiley" sites and such. They do that stuff & a ton of search arbitrage. They are Google's #1 advertiser. That has actually outperformed Google over the past couple years, though most analysts get it wrong and claim it is due to diversity of brands in IACI
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-23....
In fact, IAC went so far as firing most of their algorithmic search staff & is just syndicating the Google search feed with Google search ads. They mix in "answers" as an angle because it is infinitely scalable & essentially free content so long as you don't get penalized for it...which they are too large to get penalized, so they are printing money for now. If Google ever decides to buy a Quora or re-enter the answers niche somehow they might get smoked though.

pardon my gayness but kd and mk?! i'm in mancrush heaven
two cats i can count on for da troof and please don't ever change
either of you

max over the top beautiful and karl kick you in the ass w/ the hard cold
fax beautiful

im not really gay tho well not 'you mean like flaming?' blatant anyway
not that there's anything wrong with it pardon my seinfeld

peace & love and keep bringing that truth mr d
(but go easy on the nuking them irans willya there has to be another
way)

There are so many adds now that we are becoming immune to them.
I just dont see the fantasy in the fact that 1 billion eye balls is worth so much.
The ra ra brigade will try and convince you.
Among my friends those that want facebook already have it. Yes some are addicted to it. But as a friend of mine said last night "I am not on FB because I am a private person" so to me the peak has already been reached in most countries because those without FB are not gonna suddenly change there ways and join up. Like the internet companys pre 2000 the moment you start charging for the service a free competitor will be found and the masses will go there. Thats why I never understood the internet craze then and still dont now.

KD,you had mentioned that about 2 trillion dollars of bad paper is still sitting out there. I thought the number was closer to 6 trillion?

Very snappy, Karl. Practice makes perfect!

Good interview. On the Edge is ssoooooooooo much better than the Keiser Report. Glad to see you on OTE.

Quote:

Sad that you have to watch Russian TV to get anything resembling reality from news.

Worse. It is Iranian TV and actually I did not felt comfortable watching it since I have seen this station fabricate news before.

Ilove this defense of Wall Street rolling up a turd and passing it off for $100 billion. when is FB going to produce $100 billion in income? XOM is worth less than $400 billion. Lets see Wall Street reproduce that from scraps? AAPL is bringing $600 billion. What is missed is AAPL could be DELL 10 years from now. Anyone remember DELL? A must own high flyer that went up, up and away in the late 1990's?

I'm with Karl on these banks. I have never moved off the idea these banks were broke. Like magic, Bennie gave them some cash on mortgages in 2009 and Congress pressured the accounting regulators to legitimize balance sheet fraud and presto, things were running again. These criminals keep pressing their frauds and the whole monetary system is about to be blown to smithereens. The ECB continues to fall under pressure of idiots like the new President of France, it will collapse into a pile of crap. Once they own the bad debt, there will be much more money than debt and the bank won't be able to re-market what they have used as collateral. Like a 10 guage shot gun fired up their asses.

Iranian TV?, um no. I agree Asimov, who would have thought growing up in the 80's that we can look up Russian TV to get actual reality in todays news, It really is mind blowing.

Iranian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_TV


and: http://presstv.com/detail/2012/05/27/243....

Oh, oops. Doesn't he have a show on RT?

[Edit: Wait, I remember now. Just not paying attention.]

I've thought of a possible revenue stream for Facebook. And think, I'll only charge you a hundred million dollars if you use the idea, Zuckerberg. ... A mere tenth of a billion... Pocket change for you, bub.

It came to me when posting my favorite movies and books on his site. Why not, instead of linking to whatever lame page some user has posted about a particular one, link to a commercial outfit where said book or movie could be acquired in some fashion or form by the clicker, and get paid for the click-through? No privacy violation, because I'm the one posting my favorites. And in fact, it would be cool with me if my friends took a look at what I like.

Hey, it won't make the company worth $100 billion, but just might make them a $2 instead of a $0.

Watch out. I'm hound-doggin' you, Zuk. From now on...

Karl:

Great job on that interview! Thanks for doing that.

FYI & BTW:

I first saw that interview from a random google on "confidence games", near top of the list, not from first reading about it on the ticker guy blogs....

Re ads, search engines, social networking companies and confidence:

Wouldn't even Google's ad revenue get damaged if people were afraid of invasions of "privacy" like has happened with Facebook? And can Americans
trust Google any more not to steal and later have stolen from them private electronic financial account numbers and passwords......than they can trust
anonymous quasi-military hackers like the Chinese, or any other large gov't or corporate enterprises?

That is one reason why I agree that Facebook stock offering is a zero....buying that stock could be just a weird sort of a hidden tax. Who should expect a return from that kind of investment? It is not very financially relevant, it's about social relevance; "what is hot and what is not"... and personal advertising (I would not call reading of self promotions invasion of privacy!). (Which is not all bad...or is it even partly bad?)