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Facebook Stock Going Public?
zmaragdus writes "Facebook Inc. converted its existing stock holdings into different classes of stocks (Class A and Class B) designed to give certain shareholders more power than others. This has been typically done in an IPO of a company's stock to give important people (company founders, for instance) more clout in the actions of the company when stock is first offered to the public. While Facebook maintains that it does not plan to offer stock publicly in the near future, this restructuring is one of the critical steps in doing so."
It's at the peak of it's popularity and thus the peak of it's perceived value.
They'll "go public", the owners (founders and other investors) will make out like bandits and then retards^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfund managers will invest money in it from all of our pensions and savings. The stock will change hands many times as it is speculated upon repeatedly until such time as the next big thing comes along and it takes a slow plunge to worthlessness and irrelevancy.
In the meantime the founders are rolling in (our) cash.
Google also exists merely on advertising, so it isn't always true.
I don't. Once it's a public company, it has a fiduciary responsibility to bend its users over to try and get as much money for its shareholders as it can.
I need facebook so my wife, sister, mother, etc don't inhabit /.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Screwing users over is great for short-term revenue, but companies who are in it for the long haul value things like brand loyalty.
In this universe things work differently. Take eBay: it had huge brand loyalty and it has been pushing and pushing and people have been abandoning by the thousands. eBay last March actually created (because of a bug according to them, yeah right) a hundred thousand fake listings right in the middle of a user boycott to show the numbers were actually up instead of down. Their stock has been plummeting. Companies with public stock have stopped caring about their users/consumers long time ago. Maybe in your universe things are different, I wish I lived there ;)
...ask them for a fee to see whom of their friends viewed their profile.
Facebook isn't a true dating site, it's more of an extension of your real life social circle. Remember that cute chick your friend Greg was with at that concert where you randomly met? You two exchanged a few words, and you're pretty sure she smiled at you in an "interested" sort of way, but you were too shy/drunk/whatever to ask her for/write down her number. Luckily Greg has her as a friend, so you add her too. After she's accepted your friend request (she will, there's at least one mutual friend & she might've already met you); you of course want to know if she just Accepted and was done with that or actually checked out your profile. And that party photos where you're totally drunk, half passed out and look wicked cool. Well, guess what: You can. For 20 credits (1000 credits are $9.99) you get 24 hours of access to your profile's visitor log. Another 20 credits will even tell you whom looked at which one of your photos and videos.
You spent 40 cents for quite a bit more information than you'd get before buying a girl a drink in a bar. In five out of six cases, she might never even visit your profile, but you'll be checking for that occasional one out of six who will. At 20 cts per day and a moderate guess of 100 checks per year, they make $20 off of you directly, $50 off of you for advertising and $30 for some data mining (they have your credit card, know what ads you click, what profiles you look at and they've got pics of everything you do). That's $100, annually for, say, 5% of their 300m user base. $1.5bn ain't that bad.