“The one positive thing that this week has so far thrown light on is that there is a widespread recognition that things cannot stay the same.” — Keith Teare
Oh ye of little faith: For the many of us who BELIEVE in Consumer Internet, it’s so painful to watch the Facebook/Groupon/Zynga stock trainwreck continue, with Facebook shares slipping to below $20 today, the lowest they’ve ever been.
Shares slipped so much this afternoon that even our head-over-heels-in-love with-Facebook guy offered the former startup some monetization advice earlier, and if I were Facebook I would take it.
The concerns about Facebook’s viability as a company have been hashed and rehashed by people barely if at all qualified to do so. At this point, we underqualified tech writers know them by heart: It basically boils down to mobile insecurity, a ~50 price-to-earnings ratio and whatever “I don’t trust Zuck” means, which makes old fogies my parents conservative investors nervous.
But, the moment I figure out how, I still want to buy some Facebook stock at $20 because are you kidding me, that company is absolutely still growing despite almost no one seeing its potential value.
Imagine if every friend that you, or I, or anyone on Facebook had, were a red-hot opportunity to turn well-wishing into revenue. That’s the promise made by Karma, Facebook’s recently acquired physical gifting startup.
Facebook, you have the social graph. You have the users. You have the world. Now, all you need to do is give us an easy way to say “Happy Birthday.” With our wallets.
The very top mock-up is indicative of the potential that being able to monetize online social interaction/goodwill represents. While we have no idea what Karma’s revenue or profit was pre-acquisition, rumor has it that the startup was raking in a cut of between 20% – 40% per purchase before it got scooped up.
And now it has almost a billion users as a target market … if only some industrious engineer would build that very simple above link, and yes, figure out mobile.
If Facebook continues to make these kinds of strategic acquisitions — i.e. buys Fab next — it will win. And, if it can leverage the physical goods loophole on iOS, it can become the social shopping platform.
So buh bye lame “Social stories” and buh bye Amazon (which currently has a $100b market cap, around twice that of Facebook). Can someone please teach me how to buy Facebook stock now please? Because I believe in the future and you should too.
Disclosure: I pretty much think I only own Aol stock at the moment, but would like to buy Facebook stock, see above.
Also, there are exactly ten tickets left for our Facebook Ecosystem conference. Have at it.
Comment