Twitter's Doing Exactly The Right Thing Cutting Off Leeches
Twitter's doing exactly the right thing by taking back ownership of its own product and shutting off LinkedIn from leeching off its success.
Read the full Forbes post here
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
Monday, July 02, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Facebook-Instagram: Here Comes the Flood
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- "Kodak Goes Bankrupt and Instagram is worth a Billion Dollars. 2012, y'all"
That was a tweet from @benhjacobs that I retweeted Monday and immediately got hundreds of retweets from my followers.
For some reason, it seemed to capture the sense of awe from many over the significant milestone.
But it also gets at something else that's amazing in this story. How a small little photo application can be worth so much more -- in such a short time -- compared to an American icon. It says just how important "mobile" is in the business world today.
Sphere: Related Content
Monday, March 05, 2012
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Facebook's $100 Billion Valuation Unrealistic?
For Facebook, which will carry a ticker symbol of FB, to receive a $100 billion valuation when it makes its IPO debut, investors will have to make a lot of assumptions about their future growth.
Read the full TheStreet.com post
All Social Media Companies are Addicted to Fudging their User Numbers
Facebook is deliberately puffing up its monthly active users by using a broad definition. It's par for the course in the social media world.
Read the full post on Forbes
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
In the Year of Facebook, Beware the Social Media Stocks
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Most believe the stock/business story of 2012 is going to beFacebook -- specifically its rumored IPO which should come before the middle of the year. That's probably true. Yet, ironically, 2012 is also the year in which you need to protect yourself from other falling social media IPOs.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Zynga's Market Valuation Has Dropped $13 Billion This Week
Zynga's valuation has dropped 65% in 4 days. It deserves to keep dropping.
Read the full Forbes post
Friday, June 03, 2011
The Groupspawn IPO: What Hath It Wrought?
Groupon’s (GRPN) Andrew Mason is wacky. Even though he killed at the All Things D conference this week, I just don’t get his sense of humor. And I generally don’t like investing in companies led by 30 year olds with no read work experience.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
China Embraces Its Inner Tech Bubble
There will be a time when the China tech bubble pops - and it will be a severe reckoning - but that day is still likely at least two years away.
Read the full post here at Forbes.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
LinkedIn: Maybe Private Markets Were Right
By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- There has been endless analysis about what the LinkedIn(LNKD_) IPO means for the company itself and for other tech companies that have yet to conduct IPOs.
.......
[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]
Sphere: Related ContentTuesday, May 24, 2011
Can We Stop Saying Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Don't Want to Go Public Now?
Web companies don't want to IPO these days because Sarbanes-Oxley makes it too cumbersome? I don't buy it. Just watch.
Read the full post here at Forbes.
Who Cares Where LinkedIn's IPO Was Priced?
By Eric Jackson The stock's offer price was hiked pretty significantly into Thursday's IPO ($42 to $45), and it was priced at the high end of the range. Many people, including me, thought that this IPO price seemed fancifully high. When the stock immediately doubled on Thursday morning and then, as we approached noon, seemed close to tripling its IPO price, jaws were dropping on Wall Street. Pretty quickly, the armchair bloggers and journalists were asking how the investment banks (Morgan Stanley (MS- commentary - Trade Now) and Bank of America Merrill (BAC - commentary - Trade Now)) could have so mispriced the deal. Henry Blodget of Business Insider said immediately that the bankers had left $100 million on the table, which investors pocketed instead of LinkedIn. Joe Nocera at The New York Times on Saturday said that this under-pricing by the bankers was a sign that the dangerous ways of dot-com era of the '90s had returned with a vengeance. Josh Brown at the Reformed Broker blog complained that LinkedIn hadn't used a Dutch auction system to price the deal as Google (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now) did (with Morgan Stanley's help, no less) in its 2004 IPO. (In a Dutch auction, bankers solicit bids before the public offering and set the IPO at the highest level at which the stock can be sold.) Before we shoot the bankers (and I hate to defend them, since they're highly overpaid for what they do), I have to ask, who cares how they priced it? Was LinkedIn irreparably harmed? Hardly. The company certainly didn't seem to be fuming about the IPO in the hours after the close. All the coverage it was getting from the press was basically crowning it the king of social networking (even though its moonshot IPO is probably going to be less than 10% the size of Facebook's). LinkedIn raised less than $200 million from the IPO, and it sure looks as though it left money on the table. But management and the board chose to sell only 5.3% of their stock in the IPO. If prices hold up, they will get plenty from future secondary offerings.
RealMoney Contributor
5/23/2011 1:00 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson
Since LinkedIn's (LNKD - commentary - Trade Now) IPO on Thursday, there's been a lot of chatter about whether the bankers properly priced the deal.
That simple sentence has a lot packed into it -- especially the word "properly."
Friday, May 20, 2011
Jim Cramer is Right that LinkedIn's Underwriters Juiced the IPO
LinkedIn's bankers did try create a feeding frenzy yesterday over shares. Mission accomplished.
Read the full post here at Forbes.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
CNBC: LinkedIn IPO Insanity?
How do you stop a bubble? I don't know. That's really for the regulators and the Fed. I don't see this ending soon. We're still in the 3rd inning.
My appearance on CNBC's Closing Bell today:
Eating Crow - or Resumes -- about LinkedIn IPO
Here I am eating crow with Matt Nesto and Jeff Macke this morning, after saying yesterday that LinkedIn (LNKD) was too expensive at $45:
LinkedIn Investors Bank On Growth
By Eric Jackson I think he's right. What is the connection? OpenTable is valued based on the platform that it is growing and the future profits that it will garner from that platform. The platform is all the restaurants that sign up for the service. Those restaurants pay a set-up fee and an annual fee. The more that sign up, the more profits that flow to the bottom line. OpenTable currently has 20,000 restaurants signed up. The company is doing about $130 million in annual revenues. For LinkedIn, the company doesn't have restaurants; it has corporate clients -- headhunters and large companies that constantly need to hire people -- who pay an annual subscription fee. At the moment, LinkedIn has about 3,900 of these clients. They are going to do about $400 million to 500 million in revenue this year. Although I've criticized LinkedIn for lacking profitability and having bloated up its sales, product and general and administration costs in the past 12 months, the one area where the business has seen enormous growth is in corporate clients, making up 43% of its current revenue (up from 23% a few years ago). This is great revenue for LinkedIn -- much better than ads on its site and premium subscriptions to individual users to see who looked at their profiles in the last five days. The folks buying up LinkedIn today think that the company will grow this significantly in the years ahead. Lots of companies out there need to hire folks.
RealMoney Contributor
5/19/2011 12:15 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson
I'm amazed that LinkedIn (LNKD - commentary - Trade Now) has more than doubled in value so far today. I wouldn't have bought it at $45 or $35. Congrats to the backers, insiders and institutional flippers.
The best analysis I've seen on why people are buying LinkedIn is from Henry Blodget, who argues that investors are betting LinkedIn is the next OpenTable (OPEN - commentary - Trade Now).
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Ironfire's Jackson Interview on LinkedIn's IPO
My thoughts on the LinkedIn IPO that will price tonight, from Bloomberg TV earlier today:
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Why You Should Opt Out of the LinkedIn IPO
LinkedIn is the central place to find professional profiles and that could help the company succeed in time. At the moment, though, it's got a problem making money.
Read the full post here at Forbes.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Reuters: Do social networks like Twitter belong in media?
Fri Jul 10, 2009 3:34pm EDT
By Alexei Oreskovic - Analysis
SUN VALLEY, Idaho (Reuters) - If there's one group of executives at this week's Sun Valley media and technology conference who ought to be in good spirits, it's the handful steering the fleet of Internet social networks.
The buttresses of old media institutions, from print to television, are under stress from the advertising downturn, but social media is thriving as the world flocks to the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
But the glow of social media is tempered by the hazy business models underlying the Internet's latest trend. The world is talking about Twitter, but as far as anyone knows, the San Francisco-based microblogging site has yet to earn a dime.
So even as Twitter's Evan Williams and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg were seen conversing with CEOs from Google Inc to DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc and Amazon.com Inc to Dell Inc, there were no signs these talks would soon lead to the deals that have made the Allen & Co conference famous.
Indeed, Rupert Murdoch said Twitter would be a tough investment to justify for News Corp because it has not yet come up with a sustainable way to make money.
"Be careful of investing here," Murdoch told reporters.
Sony Corp Chief Executive Howard Stringer was similarly blunt.
"A lot of people are doing very well making very little money," he said, when asked about opportunities in social media. "That's not a club I'm willing to join."
Early combinations between old and new media, such as News Corp's acquisition of MySpace for $580 million in 2005, offer reasons for caution.
Once the top dog in social media, MySpace's popularity has been overtaken by Facebook. And when MySpace's $900 million advertising deal with Google comes to an end in July 2010, it's not clear what the future holds for the site.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt was coy when asked if he would renew the three-year deal with MySpace at $900 million.
"Never say never," he told reporters, but then talked about changes in the marketplace that could affect the terms of any deal. "We have more tricks up our sleeve now."
PAID VS FREE
Sales of traditional media staples such as newspapers and DVDs are in a multiyear and seemingly inexorable decline. By contrast, Facebook's active users doubled in eight months to top 200 million in April and U.S. visitors to Twitter surged 83 percent that month over March, according to comScore.
Social media and user-generated content have achieved a level of legitimacy in recent months as people turned to Twitter and Google's YouTube for up-to-the-minute information about major news events such as Iran's post-election protests.
"Everybody is talking about Twitter," Liberty Media Corp Chairman John Malone said. "It's got wonderful promotional juice because so many celebrities are talking about it and using it."
But he added: "It's pretty hard to think of an advertiser base for Twitter, but maybe some creative person will come up with it."
Much of the talk at Sun Valley revolved around whether social media should be free for consumers and supported by advertising, or if a fee-based business model was better.
What is also unclear is whether social networks belong under the roof of Internet companies or traditional media.
Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and others have criticized MySpace under News Corp for focusing too much on selling ads and not enough on innovation.
"The issue is how do you continue to run Internet companies as Internet companies and making sure you keep that DNA," said LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman at Sun Valley.
While News Corp's acquisition of MySpace may not be a home run, Google's $1.6 billion purchase of YouTube shows tech companies have not fared much better -- most analysts believe YouTube operates as an unprofitable unit within Google.
Still, Ironfire Capital's Eric Jackson, a former shareholder of Yahoo Inc, thinks social networks fit better with Web services offered by the likes of Google or Yahoo, than within declining traditional media businesses.
"There are questions around the revenue-generating horsepower behind some of these social networking sites," he said. "And just kind of bolting on a Twitter to a Viacom or a Time Warner, that's not going to do it."
(Additional reporting by Robert MacMillan and Yinka Adegoke, editing by Tiffany Wu and Andre Grenon)
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