Is Facebook really worth $100 billion?

Today Facebook launched on the stock market with shares valueing the company at $104 billion. People have been asking for weeks whether the company really is worth that amount of money, what with the limited revenue streams.

What do you all think?

I'm personally starting to wonder how much worse the site can get in terms of pushing advertising on me. It's certainly not the site i signed up to 5 years ago and for months i've lost alot of interest in it.

Facebook is going to start pushing ads in the form of posts from your "friends". So on your news wall your going to start seeing stuff like:

John Smith
Just checked out Ozzu! Everybody should make an account and check it out!
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Seems like its already over kill, and once they add that in they will pretty much be shooting themselves in the foot. Google +'s layout is far more appealing than Facebooks, and they don't use ad's, as of right now. Hopefully once they add the new ads people will realize G+ is the place to be.

I'd love to use G+ more but unfortunately not everyone has caught onto the idea of it yet. Like you say, i hope people realise this they will move over to G+.

It may worth $104 billion now but I don't see that happening for much longer. Once G+ gets popular (Like SB mentioned) and other forms of online interaction between two or more people, Facebook would start falling, just like MySpace has (in my opinion). Nothing lasts for ever and I think this may be Facebook's peak. But that's only my opinion.

Only way to keep a site like that keep it's worth is to drastically change it almost every year (in terms of functionality and the mission of the site) to keep it synchronized with the people's desires of online interactivity. It seems like Facebook is doing a pretty good job of it (or at least trying) with their purchase of InstaGram for $1 billion and their constant redesigning of their site.

Who knows... maybe I'm wrong and they will keep their worth even though Google+ came out.

The problem with such a high valuation is there is even more pressure on them to improve on that... but there are not many companies that have such a high value and many of those who are as valuable have much more revenue streams.

The thing that is going for Facebook is the advertisements and the gaming platform, but even that is starting to falter a bit due to some of their biggest clients (most notably Zynga) looking to focus their attention on their own gaming platform. It won't surprise me if (and when) Zynga successfully market their own platform then they likely won't be so reliant on Facebook, especially if user participation on Facebook slows down a bit which i fully expect.

I saw a few tweets from people who mentioned that their teenagers don't use Facebook because they say that is what old people do. Not sure if that viewpoint is common among younger people, but thought that was interesting.

I'm not that old...

That's what I've heard, too. I'm still young-ish in comparison at 22, but I've heard of the even younger ones using Instagram and Twitter heavily instead. Of course, Instagram is now owned by Facebook.

I would think the valuation is not so much potential revenue, but the sheer amount of personal data that Facebook possesses. Imagine how valuable that would be to advertisers.

As for Google+, I'm not sold on it yet. The best thing about it is Hangouts - that is seriously one cool app.

I can't say i am overly surprised with this, but shares have dropped to around $33 now. Down $5 from what they were when Facebook first launched on the market on Friday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18141990

Those who did buy shares though will probably do well to keep a hold of them yet, they will climb well above $38 for a brief period then i imagine it to linger around that mark for a few months before declining... unless Facebook manages to pull something out of the bag.

I agree with your comment about the value of the data Breeze. It reminded me of something i read about Facebook recently on how they managed to market their adverts going by the information you provide. The example i heard/read was if you changed your status to getting married and your female you'll see more bridal type adverts on the page, if you added to your timeline the details of a new born baby then you'd likely see more baby clothe/accessories adverts. This is a great way for Facebook to sell the adverts to the people wanting adverts as you're guaranteed to receive your target audience rather than a bunch of people that may or may not be interested in your adverts.

I don't know what its worth, but investors has put in a lot of money in it from what I understand and the site has many users (returning users unlike those at G+). There seems to be no competition to talk about.

That got to be worth something. $100 billion is a lot tho but, maybe? The company still got a lot of growing potential. And if they have some new cool stuff soon to come, hey that could make it worth more than that!

Facebook is tanking hard right now. First day they were at $104b, as of this post they're worth $68.4b. Zuckerberg is already out over $2.5b personally. Guess we'll see how far it slides.

I wonder how many people immediately sold their shares last Friday when becoming millionaires/billionaires. I know had i been one of the fortunate people to be in that position i would have... that's not just me saying that now i have the benefit of hindsight.

If I had been an investor in FB, I would have been trying to sell prior to it going public. I think pretty much all the investors smelled the tank from a mile away and wanted out. It doesn't come as a surprise to me at all. Bad revenue stream, angry 'customers', and alternative and better products available with other companies, what did they think was going to happen.

Yes. This.

i am sure they will get suckered in too. But really if it was not for the wonderful RSS feeds across soo many web sites giving updates i would of gave up a while ago on it. The site is handy but it is just wayy too social. Over social.

I have had more *plum* arguments on facebook then anywhere else, We need a Chuck Norris Facebook app. So when someone is being a troll we can open up the app to have Chuck jump through the internet and slap them in the face.

The next best thing for the internet is turning off facebook and talking to people again.