[tesla69]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

yah. down about 3K since I got it, but my other ones are doing well enough that it's not a problem. The problem with most of the market experts quoted is that they've been so fucking wrong that ms ild and I just wing it ourselves (and are doing pretty well, thanks for asking!

you're in it for the long term anyway, right?

CBS radio reported this am that insiders have been trading facebook stock through private trading platforms for a few years now.

The corporations and intelligence services have embraced FB, so it won't vanish overnight, but certainly will be replaced by something once the kids fine they want something the 'rents don't use and that they think they can use and no one is looking, like their online video game chats.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by tesla69

you're in it for the long term anyway, right?

CBS radio reported this am that insiders have been trading facebook stock through private trading platforms for a few years now.

The corporations and intelligence services have embraced FB, so it won't vanish overnight, but certainly will be replaced by something once the kids fine they want something the 'rents don't use and that they think they can use and no one is looking, like their online video game chats.

i've been reading about advertising through video game for years, so if it hasn't yet come to the consoles, it's coming eventually.

the thing with FB is that it's become as ubiquitous as public utilities. the problem is not with parents/not parents, which can be simply averted with private profiles. their catch 22 is that they need to make money from ads, but if they get spammy people will move away. google managed it somehow without spooking us but the google nerds are better than zuckerberg & co.

google+/circles is getting as intrusive if not more though, which is turning me off to them big time also-- and now google personalizes their every fucking ad by looking at my searches even with "do not track" turned on. pestilence, i say, but they keep increasing the ROI on advertising which is the key to ad revenue. right now i'm betting on google to come out ahead financially in the long run.

[ilduclo]

I thought I'd throw a couple 10K at it and see where it was in 6 months. so far, down almost 4k, but that doesn't seriously affect el banco il duclo

[Glice]

Originally Posted by floatingslowly

How often do you click on facebook ads?

Now ask your friends.

Never?

Now fear for the sustainablilty of a fake business model revolving around 'paid for likes' and ads that few care actually spend money on. Once megacorps realize that the smoke they smell has been blown up their ass, they'll run for the hills.

Get out before it's too late!!

Ok, can't actually tell if you're being a prick one way or the other, but I'm going to assume you're someone else - it doesn't work like that. London tubes - 'x people in y area like z thing'. Advertisers buy this (abstract) information, there's suddenly 20 ads for product a relating to thing z in area y. Advertising is far, far too clever (or evil, or statistic-dependant, depending on viewpoint) to rely on direct clicks on actual adverts. The broadscale hegemony of t'books means that it's an absolute goldmine of demographics.

Of course, the big danger with that stock is whether it does a myspace. And sometimes, there's not much people can do about doing a myspace. The difference between facebook and myspace, I suppose, is that facebook has become more like BT in the UK - a finger in the pie of many if not most people's way of communicating until it falls behind, gets too pricey, becomes too complex or is usurped - at the moment, it seems that diversification is going to be more likely to affect the fb userbase (see: tumblr, linkdin, twitter - all massive now, I know) rather than the vogue passing from fb to G+ or whatever.

[evollove]

-Despite my excellent language skills, Glice has lost me. I hear the echo of an interesting idea, so could you please dumb it down for a dummy?

-The only prick I can see is the guy who casually claims he's lost more money than I've made in four months. "Get a better job," is good advice. Then again, fuck yourself and buy some tasteful discretion.

-How is Facebook getting sued? They were underwritten by such luminous upstanding financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. I smell a liberal conspiracy against these honest men.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Glice

Advertising is far, far too clever (or evil, or statistic-dependant, depending on viewpoint) to rely on direct clicks on actual adverts.

sorry, that's wrong-- online advertising isn't measured like ads in the london tube. pay-per-click is the current model. impressions are important, but conversions (purchases) is the actual goal. it's a better way to ensure the client is getting a return on their money ("ROI", return on investment, is the industry jargon). which is why banner ads are mostly pointless and dead these days (except for the targeted ones that track your browser behavior)-- a million people look at them but nobody does anything about them.

unlike the "london tube" where you look at an ad and say "oh, there's such shit for sale" and go on about your day, online there is the potential of seeing, clicking, and purchasing-- the more seamless the transition the more profitable the model. clickable ads, clickable video, impulse buys, etc.

amazon dominates online sales today, so to simplify the problem, the question is what advertiser is better equipped to drive customers to the amazon tills-- facebook or google?

and yes, facebook is a great marketing tool, but it's great for businesses, not for facebook itself-- a way maybe to turn their model to profit would be to start charging business for using the service, like a website or tv channel would-- right now businesses make money and facebook has little to show for it, except for the fame--oh, and billions of dollars of market valuation of course. *but the P/E ratio remains utter shit*, unlike google, which is a real business with fat profits.

anyway, nobody has a crystal ball of course, but realize that online ads aren't the same as traditional street ads. online ads are all about conversion and transactions. e.g., see here a manual of sorts for the industry: http://www.adspeed.com/Knowledges/76..._tracking.html

[note: of course now street ads are starting to catch up with online by providing QR codes for your phone, so you can in theory point, click, and buy from your phone while standing in front of an ad, but that's not a widespread model just yet, at least here in 'merica-- give it a few years though.]

[Glice]

It's not wrong, there are multiple online revenue streams. PPC is one of them, but not the only one that makes FB profitable. Don't be such a patronising cunt.

I mention London Tube ads because FB facilitates exacting demographic research. If the data for people whose location (which thanks to various FB/ GPS/ mobile things, is far more accurate) is Harrow, and 30% of them are posting about how much they love top gear (shit TV programme), it makes sense to put a billboard up advertising the Clarkson (presenter) biog in that area because you already know that people are interested in that; if 0.01% are posting about Top Gear in Pinner, there's no point putting the same billboard up there.

At a lower level, PPC is god, of course, but one of facebook's strengths is in unfiltered market research. Provided the data isn't attributed directly to a single human - it remains in abstract terms - that's not in contravention of many laws (well, it is, but big businesses' legal circumvention is also a massive and smart/ evil enterprise).

[!@#$%!]

yah but the question is not if FB is profitable-- it made a billion bucks profit last year, so of course it's profitable.

the question is whether the profits are large enough to justify the $104 billion market valuation. (giving you a P/E ratio of over 100, whereas google is at 18.5 or so-- their profit last year was $9.6 billion)

the market's answer so far is "no", and the price keeps dropping (barely above $31 right now) and it will keep dropping until it finds its right level-- which is somewhere nobody yet knows, but nobody reasonable expects it to crash into nothingness-- just to find its correct level.

and flottibags is of course right--people not clicking the ads simply limit the value of the ads. you can spin that 100 ways to sunday but the basic fact is that people don't click FB ads. so-- how far can profits increase and share price decrease to make this a good stock? prolly when it approaches a similar P/E ratio as google.

and the there is still the issue of trusting zuckerberg not to run the thing into the ground. fortunately for investors the other 2 top execs seem saner:
http://newsroom.fb.com/content/defau...x?NewsAreaId=1
however, if this bloated IPO is a sign of how things are run at FB, in my mind it's still a no buy.

[tesla69]

Originally Posted by Glice

Of course, the big danger with that stock is whether it does a myspace.

or a friendster or a napster or a tapetrader.com...

Don't forget, by US law a publicly traded company must maximize profits for its shareholders, not its users. So facebook may end up not having any legal choice but to harvest user data and continue to provide a platform for the intelligence agencies to continue to map out private social interactions, so 20 years down the line when freedomlover x is an underground terrorist, they can look back at who he talked to in high school and harass his them as if they have any idea where freedomlover x might be. I've never heard the Tea Partiers protest this intrusiveness by the Government in business. On the other hand, I've also never heard the Occupy people call to stop using these sources of data for the intelligence agencies, cell phones, internet, etc...or demand real encryption be available, not the crackable shit the NSA provides.

[!@#$%!]

facebook shares @ $27

but here's an opposing argument that sez you shouldn't worry about it:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymag...s-stock-price/

I don’t know what Facebook is worth today, and I don’t care. Because that type of short-term thinking has nothing to do with what it takes to build a great company. To me, Facebook’s value can be measured in far different ways — how well it’s serving its members, how its treating and compensating its employees, its social impact on society as a whole and, of course, how well it’s positioning itself for the future.

However, he's not mentioning management. Management! That's WHO builds a great company:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPpx5sNECco
(w/ added hilarious soundtrack.)

(the original one is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3hu3iG8B2g )

See, that, that is what makes one worry.

[floatingslowly]

I would love to go into greater detail about advertisers being swindled using skewed (read: fake) "like" data, but I can't be fucked to thumb_type that shit out on my phone.

This IPO, and it's pricing, were built upon smoke and mirrors.

But I digress,

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

and flottibags is of course right--

Of course!

[EVOLghost]

Originally Posted by evollove

-The only prick I can see is the guy who casually claims he's lost more money than I've made in four months. "Get a better job," is good advice. Then again, fuck yourself and buy some tasteful discretion.
.

what's there to be discreet about? Guy invested 10k(not that much if you save well) and lost 4k(which has the possibility of gain) in stock value.

[floatingslowly]

Says the guy with a housekeeper.

Prick.....!!!!

[ilduclo]

actually, most everything is off pretty well lately, but with the $$ I got from being a rentier and other RE deals, as well as LONG term ownership (5+years) of a couple stellar tech stocks, I'm still way ahead, and I don't sell in a down market, so, hopefully will be okey dokey in the long thing.....FB currently pretty close to $13 from what I bought it at. paper loss so far $5054......

[tesla69]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

....FB currently pretty close to $13 from what I bought it at. paper loss so far $5054......

did you see mat taibbi's blog today: you and a million other people got hosed by the banksters, man. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...party-20120523

A suit has been filed by Facebook shareholders against Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, Morgan Stanley and others. It's based on a very simple concept: when internal analysts learned that Facebook’s numbers were going to be worse than expected, the company and its bankers didn’t tell everyone, but just "selectively disclosed" information to a small group of "preferred investors."

Isn't that called insider trading? Of course, under a fascist state, everything is illegal, just selectively enforced.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

facebook is the new myspace, on the verge of collapse among teenage users who have switched. myspace may come back if bands buy back into it. brick and mortar, independent bookstores are thriving and rising because the naturally empty place in the market for book retailers after the rise and all of the barnes and noble/borders empire. so maybe the trend will continue, and we will rehumanize our society and begin to communicate directly in the original social media, the eyes, mouth, and ears.

[floatingslowly]

Fyah pon di walls o babylon.

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by floatingslowly

Fyah pon di walls o babylon.

wicked.. wicked babylon

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

brick and mortar, independent bookstores are thriving and rising because the naturally empty place in the market for book retailers after the rise and all of the barnes and noble/borders empire. so maybe the trend will continue, and we will rehumanize our society and begin to communicate directly in the original social media, the eyes, mouth, and ears.

i hope the irony of proclaiming this on an internet forum is not lost on you

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i hope the irony of proclaiming this on an internet forum is not lost on you

on a dying forum? of course not. when the grid is smashed I'll catch y'all at an acoustic sonic youth cover band gig