Facebook’s First Year Post-IPO: the Most Important Thing It Did (CNBC.com)
One year later, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has figured out mobile, experts say. The social networking giant may have had a rough patch after its IPO, but Facebook has quickly turned things around by cashing in on its users’ obsession with mobile. “One of the big complaints at the company’s IPO was that it doesn’t make any money on mobile, and that was true and fair at the time,” said Jason Stein, founder and president of the social media agency Laundry Service. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) had zero revenue on its mobile-ad platform when it went public but posted $375 million on mobile in the first quarter, Stein said.
Dogs, cats, horses, toasters: You name it, it has a Facebook page. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) now has one billion users – but ten per cent of them are not human, according to new research. At least 100 million of Facebook’s ‘monthly active users’ are pets, brands and companies – and even Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) founder Mark Zuckeberg’s dog Beast has a page. According to eMarketer, an internet market research company, only 889.3 million of the one billion users are real people. Quartz reports that Facebook claims it currently has 1.11 billion users but says that it will not actually reach this number of human users until 2014.
Facebook, Twitter announce apps for Google’s Glass (Phys.Org)
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) says it’s still figuring out the best ways to use Glass, but the company announced Thursday that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), Twitter and several other media firms have built their own applications for the futuristic-looking wearable computer. Facebook confirmed that its members can take pictures with Glass and post them to their Facebook timelines, with an app that allows them to add comments or even change their minds and delete the photo later.
Charts show how Facebook destroyed $40 billion in value during its first year as a public company (Quartz)
Hard to believe but it’s true. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) shares priced exactly one year ago today at $38 a share, giving the social media behemoth a market value of round $104 billion. (“Pricing” is when the company gets the money and the investment bank gets the shares, which it then turns around and sells to stock-market investors.) Today, with shares fluttering around $26.40, the enterprise is valued at around $64 billion. That means that in Facebook’s first year, some $40 billion in market value was vaporized, a remarkable accomplishment of sorts.
Facebook Struggles to Satisfy Investors About Mobile Earnings (Businessweek)
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) marked its first anniversary as a public company on May 17, and investors had little reason for merriment. Through May 14 shares were down 29 percent from the initial public offering price of $38, making Facebook the fifth-worst performer of the 124 stocks that debuted during the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Among companies that raised $200 million or more in an IPO, the social network ranks last. The stock has climbed more than 50 percent from its September low and has a market value of $65 billion—behind EBay (EBAY) at $73 billion and ahead of Time Warner (TWX) ($57 billion) and DirecTV (DTV) ($36 billion). Yet a year after the company raised $16 billion in the largest technology IPO on record, investors remain concerned about its ability to generate earnings as a growing number of users shift from personal computers to smartphones and tablets.
