Jimmy Stuart @JStuartTweets: Facebook has an extremely uncertain future, with the outcome teetering from good extremes to bad ones. How does it end?
Answer:
Only the headlines say Facebook has an uncertain future. The headlines also said Fukishama radiation was going to hit San Francisco within days of the tsunami. The headlines also said Avian Flu was going to wipe out the world, or at least be a major epidemic? Well, where is Avian Flu?
And where are the apologies? How come the people who write the headlines never apologize when they are wrong? Thousands of people in San Francisco and the rest of Japan were scared to death because of the headlines created after the tsunami? Where are the apologies to those people? Where is Swine Flu? Where are the weapons of mass destruction?
Ok, and now people are saying a company with a billion addicted users that is also the website that people spend the most time on (compared with a billion other websites) is “teetering” on self-destruction.
I’ll tell you from my perspective. Not only do I spend a lot of time on Facebook but I advertise on Facebook and I am an advisor or investor in several social media agencies that focus on Facebook and I was also an investor in the largest social media agency.
Facebook is an enormous success and is going to continue to be. I am seeing them unveil new sources of revenue on a weekly basis. Do you notice the ad that is now there on the login page? It wasn’t there last week. Or the fact that brand pages with over 100,000 fans can now promote specific posts. That’s about a month old. Or the fact that there will be realtime bidding on Facebook ad units. That was mentioned on the conference call but I don’t think has been released yet. And then there’s mobile. Facebook is not going anywhere.
But I still see people saying “Mark Zuckerberg is not ready to be a CEO”. Are you kidding me? How many users did he build the site up to? Has anyone else ever done that in the history of the planet Earth? Let’s look at his latest achievement. The IPO. People say the IPO was a failure. Very funny. He raised the great amount of money at the highest possible amount, with the lowest dilution, and paid a lower percentage of fees to Wall Street than any IPO before him. That’s a pretty amazing success. If you bought the IPO for a quick flip, sorry. You lost. But if you bought for the long run, you’re going to be a big winner. Even bigger if you buy now.