First, did it go horribly wrong?
I would have to answer yes, for those who bought into it. For those of us who just played a few shares here and there, it’s frequent price swings gave some of us an opportunity to play it like the latest penny stock reverse merger. Thankfully I just played it a couple of times before seeing that it could sharply fall.
Stories continue to come out. Here’s a great headline:
Facebook: The Worst IPO Ever?
And another one:
Could Facebook fire Zuckerberg?
And my personal favorite:
Is Facebook’s Zuckerberg in over his hoodie?
So the question is can Mark Zuckerberg stay on and keep this ship moving forward? Or, is it time for a change at the helm?
I think that is an easy question to answer. Of course he should stay. The problem with the Facebook IPO was that the move to the mobile web came a bit faster than was good for Facebook stock. The mobile web is so much harder to monetize, as the content is distributed in different ways on different devices. Running several blogs, including this one and a very hot political blog I never talk about here, I can tell you that much of our mobile content is being picked up by people using Pulse or other programs that grab the content, excluding the ads and other links on your site as a publisher, and then display it with their own ads.
Until just a year ago, Facebook did not even have its own iPad application. Third party apps were used, and the experience was not pure Facebook. It is very hard to monetize the data if the advertising does not come with it. Facebook’s content is propagated still by many different readers.
The other problem comes from a number of advertisers not getting the bang for the buck they wanted. While Facebook appears to be able to target certain demographics so perfectly, the advertiser has a great deal of trouble having that advertisement being seen. Google knows how to get their ads seen. Facebook is failing in that department.
Now that is something somebody at Facebook needs to fix.
I have advertised products before on Facebook, and I can promise you that the click-throughs yielded no sales I could Identify for a product also being sold via Google ads. That’s my real world example, and I see it that was because Facebook just does not let any advertiser get their ads seen. Those that stumble on them are not likely as solid as those that see what they are searching out on Google.
Facebook needs to find a fix for that.
That’s my take. Let me know your thoughts!