This week we've been hearing about the debacle that was the Facebook IPO.Which has revealed that some of the underwriters for the IPO were doing shady things. Matt Taibbi believes that this indicates that there are essentially two markets. One for the insiders and one for the schumcks, the every day investors.
Why is this important? Well, based on the discussions I've read online, there's a lot of concern of the validity of the whole IPO process, the valuation methods of companies and how investors think of companies. The valuation of Facebook had a great deal of discussion before the final IPO price of $38/share, this was partially driven by two articles that came out. In the first one it was mentioned that GM was pulling it's account because "Facebook ads don't work." The other article of note relates that researchers found that 44% of Facebook users will NEVER click an ad. This research is important because some of the valuation is based on the conversion rates of ad views to ad clicks. On average Facebook was only able to earn around $4.34 per user. The valuation of $100 billion puts the life time earning potential per user at $100 (at 1 billion users). This is pretty low, but at the same time, if only 560 million users ever click ad, that pushes means the people that do click ads need to be earning Facebook roughly $200.
MIT Technology Review discusses how this is an unsustainable growth model for Facebook. Essentially, Facebook will begin to drive down the cost per view for their advertisers to try to increase their total revenue. This falls into the race to the bottom mentality that crushes industries. Advertisers will be able to say to any website, why should we pay you x amount per ad when we only pay Facebook y there is no way that you can get me more views than Facebook. The only way that a site could get more revenue if they can show data for a higher click through and conversion rates than Facebook. That might be tough. The Review article argues that this will eventually kill Facebook and a lot of the ad driven website business models.
The other aspect of the IPO is a difference in the way that business and technology media are reporting on Facebook. Things have shifted from all the non-business related activities to focusing solely on this aspect of Facebook. This will likely shift over time, but I believe that these considerations will be discussed in any article related to Facebook. If Facebook wants to remain a haven for activists it will be difficult if there are potential suits over people being activists. There will be an increase of risk aversion within the "owners" of the company as there will be influence from investors.
Zuckerberg has said that he plans on doing what is best for the long term and try to ignore the demands of investors. He might be able to do that because he still owns 57% of the voting rights for the company. However, it will be difficult for him to avoid the influence of the discourse of media outlets. Even if he gets all his news from his friends on Facebook, there will likely be articles posted that will give him news about the company and things that he probably won't want to read.
Essentially, discussions will shift from being about the risk of privacy for users to how changes to Facebook will impact investors bottom line. I don't think this is healthy for businesses, consumers of Facebook or the general public. There are other things companies do that are unrelated to investors that are important for society as a whole. The Facebook coverage really indicates that we don't look at businesses in a long term sustainable manner. We need to change this if we want to save capitalism.
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