I can think of few subjects less interesting than Facebook’s forthcoming IPO. There, I said it.
I honestly don’t get what the big deal is. So a few thousand people will finally liquidize their locked-up wealth, and the hoi polloi will at last be able to buy Facebook shares. Stop the presses! (It won’t meaningfully affect their ability to buy other companies; they already have $4 billion in cash on hand, and I seriously doubt they have any multibillion dollar acquisitions in mind.)
I guess if you measure innovation by keeping financial score, this seems exciting, but if you measure by, you know, actual innovation, this is a total nonevent.
However. All the IPO furore has introduced one interesting data point: Mark Zuckerberg’s S-1 letter, which includes the unexpectedly striking–daring, even–paragraphs
We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.
Only about 5% Facebook gamers pay to play freemium games. If Facebook could up this percentage, it and its third-party app developers could make a lot more money. That’s the idea behind a new promotion Facebook announced today where those who’ve never bought Facebook Credits virtual currency before will be offered $4 in free Credits when they buy $1. This gets users to set up their credit card and experience the rush of paying for an enhanced gaming experience. → Read More
When you listen, read, or watch through a Facebook Open Graph app, a few of your friends hear about through the news feed, Ticker, or Timeline. Starting this week, Facebook is allowing advertisers to pay for more exposure of listen, read, or watch stories that mention them by turning the stories into a new form of Sponsored Story social ads.
Open Graph action Sponsored Stories could further Facebook’s goal of turn all ads social, and boost revenue by filling the new inventory from Facebook now permitting Sponsored Stories ads in the news feed. → Read More
How do you meet new people in today’s digital age, without over-exposing yourself the creeps, trolls and spammers? The answer, perhaps, is build a social service on top of Facebook, leveraging your network, your friends of friends and shared interests to form connections with people you don’t know. That’s what the new startup Speeksy is doing. The service is virtualizing the experience of going out to a bar or nightclub by offering an online venue where users can interact, message each other and video chat, while bonding over their shared music playlists.
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Want to win some extra visibility for your brand on Facebook? Post about current events. Brands grabbed 99.7% higher engagement on their Page posts by talking about the Super Bowl yesterday, and 60% higher engagement over the past 6 weeks compared to the average post.
The data from a Buddy Media study of 1,400 of the world’s largest brands indicates they should make sure to post about holidays, sporting events, breaking news, and other trending topics. Here’s how this strategy works: → Read More
I dare you to Facebook Like or even comment on this post. You can’t, because the Facebook Javascript API, the backend system which allows developer applications and Facebook’s own apps like Likes and Comments to communicate with the data available on the social network, is down, and has been down for at least an hour as far as I can tell, begging the question, “If article falls on a blog and no one Likes it, does it make a sound?”
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Facebook is testing a new photo viewer layout that mounts engagement buttons and comments to the right rather than beneath images. See, Facebook doesn’t want you to just view comments, it wants you to start a conversation. Apparently the company doesn’t care about being accused of copying Google+, since the viewer’s layout is very similar to that of its competitor. → Read More
In case you happened to be the victim of a day-long coma yesterday, it was a very exciting day for Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, and that quaint little social network we’ve all come to know, love, and be terrified of. Facebook filed its S-1 on Thursday with the crystal clear intent to go public on a market near you very soon, and will be raising $5 billion ahead of its IPO at an expected valuation of between $75 and $100 billion.
In fact, there was so much excitement and noise around Facebook’s IPO yesterday that the volume of visitors looking to check out Facebook’s filing succeeded in crashing the SEC’s website. Hitwise tells us that SEC.gov apparently saw a 15 percent increase in total visits, compared to the day before and a 42 percent compared to previous Thursday. And guess who was the number two source of traffic for the site? That’s right, TechCrunch.com — less than 3 percent behind the top source, Google.com. Thanks to you, readers, we gave the SEC all the traffic they could handle. And apparently more. → Read More
Just a little tidbit from everyone’s favorite reading material this week, the Facebook IPO filing: the company noted that it now stores over 100 petabytes of media (photos and videos) uploaded by its 845 million users. In case “100 petabytes” didn’t blow you over, the filing further explains that’s equal to “100 quadrillion bytes.”
OK, now you’re just showing off, Facebook.
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Within Facebook’s S-1, the social network revealed that its Payments business is bringing in $557 million in revenue per year. As the company explains, it currently requires Payments integration in games on Facebook. But according to the filing, Facebook is considering what could be very big moves in the payments space.
From the filing, Facebook writes that “we may seek to extend the use of Payments to other types of apps in the future.” It’s not specific about what these other apps are, but they could include anything that somehow uses Facebook. Dating apps, social shopping apps, news-reading apps — who knows? The filing is meant to paint a broad picture of where Facebook is headed, and the line could just be a simple aside for potential investors. But still, any developer running payments in a way that connects to Facebook should keep it in mind.
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Facebook just revealed its financials in preparation for its public offering.
Bear with me: This means no more “leaks” of Facebook’s revenue numbers to spike its valuation in secondary markets. No more banal and vague conversations about how Facebook is “killing it” at San Francisco bars. It means that I’ll never have to write another one of these “Report: Blah Blah Blah” posts about Facebook revenue using this Zuckerberg dollar graphic I made for Mike. → Read More
Earlier analyst estimates from December had pegged the monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile apps at around 300 million per month. This number includes smartphone apps, like those for the Android and iPhone, but also apps that run on BlackBerry, Nokia, and feature phones. At the time, that number equated to roughly 40% of the company’s overall user base.
Facebook hadn’t revealed an official number for monthly active users on mobile since September, however, which was then at 350 million users for both mobile apps and mobile web combined. Today, thanks the Facebook IPO filing, we have an update to the official numbers: there are now 425 mobile monthly active users as of December 2011, out of Facebook’s total 825 million users. → Read More
Facebook’s $5 billion S-1 IPO filing includes a detailed assessment of business risks. These include: its lack of mobile monetization and the fact that it doesn’t own a mobile platform, government censorship and privacy scrutiny, inability to maintain its growth rate, and competition from Google+ as well as Twitter and Microsoft.
Here’s a closer look at these risks, followed by the full text of the risk summary, and you can see the whole Risk Factors section starting on page 10 of the S-1 filing to the SEC. → Read More
It appears that the excitement over the Facebook IPO has crashed the SEC’s website. The link to the Facebook SEC filing, previously available here, is no longer loading. Instead, we’re seeing a “this webpage is not available message” when attempting to load the site using Google’s Chrome web browser, and similar errors in other browsers. This has gone on for several minutes now, as everyone is clicking through to read the filing. That’s too bad for anyone coming late to the news – you’ll have to wait for those who already had it loaded up on their screens to tell you what it said.
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Facebook has just filed its S-1 to IPO. Below is the letter from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s purpose, in which he explains “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us.” → Read More
The wait is over: Facebook has just filed for its IPO.
Facebook is looking to raise $5 billion— and will mint hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of employees as millionaires in the process. You can find its S-1 embedded below, or right here.
Rumors of Facebook’s public offering have been swirling for years, and have long been routinely sidestepped by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. The company has openly acknowledged that an IPO was indeed inevitable, but has avoided giving any sense of timing — “When we’re ready” has become a familiar mantra from Facebook executives.
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Facebook has an answer to those wondering how it will justify its IPO price and keep revenues growing as it saturates key markets: a new behavioral ad targeting system. Facebook has been quietly rolling out the beta of “Open Graph action spec targeting” which allows advertisers to target users by what they listen to, where they travel, what they buy, and other in-app activity.
These behaviors can more accurately denote conversion potential than a user’s biography or interests, That means Open Graph action spec ad targeting could turn finding a needle in a haystack into shooting fish in a barrel. The targeting options could improve the ROI of Facebook ads, and thereby attract a new class of advertisers, get existing ones to spend more, and pull in dollars from search, display, and offline channels. → Read More
How did Facebook become worth so much money that it could file for the biggest IPO in tech history? By building a highly defensible product, platform, and advertising business on top of brilliant talent and valuable data. It now has several competitive advantages that protect it from disruption and could give it a long life as the primary online identity provider. Here are the 5 components that make Facebook a smart long-term bet for investors, regardless of its exact IPO pricing. → Read More
Personal recommendations have always been a part of ecommerce, but there has been little innovation since Amazon introduced retail and product personalization 10 years ago. But with the increasing mountains of data at digital retailers’ fingertips, ecommerce is about to get even more personal.
The fact is that right now there is little iteration from personalized ecommerce beyond what is taking place on Amazon. So you’ll see suggestions of what other shoppers who bought a certain item also purchased, or recommendations to similar items to what you have purchased, but there is a whole world of social data, and even more-in-depth purchase data that can be mined by retailers to help increase sales. → Read More
The Wall Street Journal has just reported that Facebook may file for its long-awaited IPO as soon as this Wednesday, but notes that the “timing is still being discussed”, according to an anonymous source. The article says that Facebook is eyeing a valuation between $75 and $100 billion as it raises up to $10 billion, which is in line with a previous WSJ report last November.
The article also reports that Morgan Stanley is currently the frontrunner to secure the top, “lead left” position in the filing, with Goldman Sachs playing a “significant role” as well. The news comes shortly after Facebook temporarily froze secondary trades on its shares, sparking speculation that the IPO filing may be imminent. → Read More
