Unbelievable amount of money involved for just "a website".
I was reading earlier this week that Bono was set to make 900 mil on 1.5% shares
Can see the the users having a problem once there is a bigger flood of advertising on the site, personally I've avoided using it due to a lot of wankers trying to be my "friend".
My auntie works for santander, she's head of 'cahoot' the online arm of the bank. Worked her way up to that, brilliant job
Anyway, she works with facebook and there adveritising policy is all about psychology, they look at what you talk about, who you are friends with, what pages you like etc etc and base adverts around that, if you talk about something the adverts around the page will be directed towards your tastes/talking points. So clever, can understand why the business has grown to be worth billions.
Like you say, a lot of money for a non physical thing.....Like any share though i suppose.
Quote by Chinese_alanMy auntie works for santander, she's head of 'cahoot' the online arm of the bank. Worked her way up to that, brilliant job
Anyway, she works with facebook and there adveritising policy is all about psychology, they look at what you talk about, who you are friends with, what pages you like etc etc and base adverts around that, if you talk about something the adverts around the page will be directed towards your tastes/talking points. So clever, can understand why the business has grown to be worth billions.
Like you say, a lot of money for a non physical thing.....Like any share though i suppose.
Adverts do that on most pages now, I get loads of clothing ones on most pages i go on. Quite handy for when it's advertising a sale like.
And personally i think loads of people will buy them for the novelty seeing as though it's been publicised so much. A great idea cause as demand goes up so does the price!
I've studied information management as a part of my curriculum (International Business), and I can say that there is a tremendous amount of money / psychology involved in ventures like Facebook, and Google especially. The amount of information gathered about their users and the potential monetary value of it goes beyond whatever you might think is possible. My main worry is the application of this knowledge, and if/when the point will come when this information is put to use in 'bad' privacy-invading ways, like governmental control.
An example of how far this stretches is that the World Health Organization works together with Google, as Google is able to tell whenever a major epidemic or disease might-, or is about to hit the world. They can predict such things when search queries for similar symptoms in particular regions of the world are diverging from the 'normal' pattern. In fact- just going from your search queries and click history, they're able to make a profile of you and make reasonably accurate predictions about your future. It's all a matter of statistics.
Back to Facebook and their IPO, I expect that it will do well and continue to grow- at least for a certain matter of time, until the market is saturated and nearly everybody has a Facebook page. After that they'll start including more and more services to keep you on their site for as long as possible, to keep the information (and the subsequent income) flowing in. The only way that they can really fail is if significantly better service comes along to replace it (remember the quick demise of Myspace after Facebook came along). However, because of the sheer amount of resources that Facebook has at hand, they'll probably just buy the company offering the replacing product/service and incorporate it into their current service.
Always remember that if you're not paying for it, then you're not the customer- you're the product being sold.
Just seen on the news that Facebook shares have gone down in value by 9 billion USD in 24 hours. It seems that investors still haven't grasped the dangers of dot.com investment.
Sat May 19, 2012 12:25 pm (Last edited: Sat May 19, 2012 12:27 pm)
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